University Bulletin 

New Series, Vol. XIII [ No - 5 



THE LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 



From the Proceedings of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club and Classical Conference 
held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 30, 191 1 



HUMANISTIC PAPERS, SECOND SERIES, I 



Reprint from the School Review, October, November, December, 191 1 



•Boogmpb* 



THE LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 



From the Proceedings of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club and Classical Conference 
held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 30, 1911 



HUMANISTIC PAPERS, SECOND SERIES, I 



Reprint from the School Review, October, November, December, 1 9 1 1 



V* 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. The Place of Modern Languages in American Educa- 
tion 3 

Edward C. Armstrong, The Johns Hopkins University 

II. The Aims of Modern-Language Teaching in the Second- 
ary School 17 

John S. Nollen, Lake Forest College 

III. The Needs of Modern-Language Instruction . .22 

A. F. Kuersteiner, Indiana University 

IV. The Practical Value of Humanistic Studies . . .36 

William Gardner Hale, The University of Chicago 

V. The Place of Latin in Secondary Education . . 59 

E. D. McQueen Gray, The University of New Mexico 

VI. The Value of the Ancient Literatures in Life . . 64 
James Bryce 



THE LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 



I. THE PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN AMERICAN 

EDUCATION 1 



EDWARD C. ARMSTRONG 

The Johns Hopkins University 



The change from wagon to railway, trolley, automobile, and 
aeroplane, from letter to telegraph and telephone, from hand- 
power to steam and electricity, are but a few of the externals 
of an age of profound transition. The financial, political, social, 
moral, and intellectual revolution that has accompanied the ma- 
terial reconstruction is of equal magnitude and of more basal 
import. No less radical is the alteration that has taken place 
in the field of education, and here as elsewhere the static stage 
has not been reached. All indications point to further changes 
as radical as any in the past, and no man can with safety predict 
the forms that will prevail. As a consequence, we may not 
lull ourselves with the thought that what has been will be, nor 
rest in the assurance that systems and methods should be main- 
tained for the sole reason that they have till now sufficed. The 
lessons of experience never cease to be valuable, but to be ready 
for the morrow we must test them by the fundamentals, by the 
sound educational principles that hold for all times and for all 
surroundings. There is today an especially potent call for the 
open mind. But an open mind involves mind as well as openness 
— the receptiveness must be intelligent. All change involves dis- 
turbance, discomfort, loss of time and energy, relegation to the 
scrap-heap, along with the outworn, of materials that are still 
serviceable. Changes can be justified only if there is a reason- 
able basis for expectation that they will result in a sum-total of 
ultimate gain. 

Thus the question of determining the place of modern lan- 
guages in American education is closely joined to the broader 

"A paper read before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club at Ann Arbor, March 30,1911. 
A few copies of this Bulletin will be available for distribution. Those desiring a copy may 
address (inclosing a two-cent stamp) Mr. Louis P. Jocelyn, secretary of the Michigan 
Schoolmasters' Club, 541 South Division Street, Ann Arbor, Mich. 



4 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

question of the relation of American education to the chang-insr 
structure of our country. What their place now is, and whether 
it is justified, can best be determined by the history of our 
studies. What that place should be in the future must be judged 
on the basis of careful thought and cautious testing. What that 
place will be depends on us — on our receptiveness, our intelli- 
gence, our fidelity. 

The undisputed right of the modern languages to more than 
a precarious and incidental place in our curricula is not of long 
standing. Looked upon, now as a trade equipment, now as an 
accomplishment, they were ranked with commercial bookkeeping 
and tables of foreign exchange, or with fencing and piano- 
playing ; their fitting teacher, a German clerk in a counting-room 
or the local dancing-master. When taught in our schools, these 
subjects were held in scant esteem. Latin and Greek looked 
down on them in cold disdain, and the highest dignity which 
could be hoped was that a teacher of the ancient languages should 
add them to his subjects as a pastime. Such was our rank but 
a generation back. When a call was issued in 1883 for the con- 
ference of modern-language teachers that resulted in the estab- 
lishment of the Modern Language Association, one of the 
leading university presidents said to the prime mover of the 
conference: "And will you not have my Chinese laundryman 
address you? He is past-master in one of your living languages." 
In 1886 the first periodical devoted to modern languages was 
issued, and its initial number appeared with but one name on the 
subscription list. No need to be ashamed of or to regret these 
inauspicious beginnings. It is well that every step of progress 
had to be earned, every advance in esteem to be merited. Not 
through inherited position, not by favoritism, it must be then by 
the merit o'f the cause that the quality of the teacher and his 
courses and the rank and dignity of the subject have grown so 
mightily. The Modern Language Association counts eleven hun- 
dred members : the Publications of the Modern Language Asso- 
ciation, Modern Language Notes, Modern Philology, The Journal 
of English and Germanic Philology, The Romanic Review, come 
monthly or quarterly to our desks; the earlier professorship of 



PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 5 

modern languages in college and university has been replaced 
by separate teaching for German and for French in almost all 
cases, and for Spanish or Italian in many instances; German or 
French, or both, are now taught in all the leading secondary 
schools. And the strife between the ancients and the moderns 
no longer exists. Our aristocratic elder sisters do not send us 
to the nursery for our bread and milk when there is company 
to dinner, nor are they now unwilling that we should have young 
admirers of our own. They have not only ceased to snub us, 
but are glad to join forces in vieing with the attractiveness or 
the athletic young cousins who have opened up bakeries and 
cabinet-makers' shops on the ground floor, whose energy and 
aggressiveness are an excellent stimulus, but whose moving in 
makes us all sit close and taxes the resources of the house. Con- 
ceits aside, classics and modern languages are a great source of 
strength each to the other. It is they of the classics who have 
set the example which serves as a constant guide in developing 
the effectiveness of language as a discipline; while we perhaps 
have been able to throw light on the essential problem of asso- 
ciating language with life, of aiding the pupil to feel that lan- 
guage is more than a declining, conjugating, parsing, and 
scanning machine. Not that this has ever been the attitude of 
the representative teacher of the classics, but our greater oppor- 
tunity for contact with the life behind the languages we teach 
enables us to point more readily the way to prevent its being the 
attitude of the pupil. 

In the light of these facts, it is far from excessive to main- 
tain that the rapid and substantial advance of modern-language 
work in America in the past thirty-five years demonstrates its 
vitality and usefulness and gives fine promise. The foundations 
are laid: what ought the superstructure to be? Is it in us to 
build for the future ; to distinguish permanent values from quick 
and showy returns? Our subjects have an assured place in 
American education; we must give our thought and energy to 
its being the proper place. I should like to consider for a while 
the essentials of modern-language teaching -if -that place is to 
be attained. 



6 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

The living languages have a concrete utility — a commercial 
value that can be demonstrated and that has been an impetus in 
their extension in the schools, even though it is nothing like so 
manifest here as in many other countries. Small need to argue 
with a Swiss that he should be a polyglot, when he can hardly 
walk out of a morning to stretch his legs without coming in 
contact with at least three languages ; when the material pros- 
perity, not only of many individuals but of the very nation, 
hinges upon making captious travelers comfortable in half a 
dozen tongues. The part the schoolmaster played in preparing 
the victories of the Franco-Prussian War or in rendering possible 
the commercial strides of the empire has been an ever-present 
object lesson to Germany and to the adjacent nations. But in 
the United States we have remained walled off, not alone by 
mighty oceans on the east and west, by commercial barriers on 
the north and south, but by our absorption in the development 
of a great country not yet peopled. Now we are learning that 
trade is a world-question ; that permanent prosperity depends 
on outlets in the markets of all nations; that when we compete 
by letter or in person for our share of commerce we must be able 
to write or talk, as do our rivals, in languages the buyer can 
understand, and that we must know enough of his habits and his 
modes of thought to find common bases of interest. While we 
slept, or read David Harum, or discussed the baseball score, the 
rich trade of South America has gone to other bidders. This is 
no negligible factor, no unimportant detail, and yet — and yet — 
if that be the ground of our teaching languages, we should plan 
our courses in the schools somewhat in this order: Portuguese; 
Spanish; Chinese; Tagalog; and we should make the chief aims: 
commercial letter-writing; phrases of barter; the terminology of 
poker, pinochle, or whatever game it be that international drum- 
mers affect. And, after all, still keeping the practical stand- 
point, what proportion of the pupils of an average high school 
would ever find occasion to put this equipment into service? 
Viewed still more broadly, is education in language to be meas- 
ured by the power to rattle off set phrases in a foreign tongue? 
If so, we shall never be able to cope as educated types with the 



PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 7 

flunkeys of any cosmopolitan hotel. It is not thus that we meas- 
ure educational values. The broader contact with world-inter- 
ests that comes from a study of foreign languages and the 
knowledge of the languages themselves is of importance and 
value from a commercial standpoint; but if this be the sole or 
even the main aim of their study they fail to justify themselves, 
not alone in their cultural value, but even from a practical point 
of view. The school of commerce or the Berlitz school can do 
this work more effectively than we, and doing it alone for such 
as have need or wish for it can save us from burning up the 
house each time we wish to roast a pig. 

If, in our general school system, a widespread teaching of 
the modern languages cannot be justified by their commercial 
value, no more can it be defended merely and alone on the ground 
of their utility as spoken media. Pleasant as it may be, and 
helpful withal, for the American to converse with the native in 
his own tongue when he journeys across the water, we who have 
taught know all too well that, in the time it is possible to allot, 
the average pupil will not learn to speak German or French. 
The best that can be accomplished, and the most it is wise to 
aim for under our present system, is to give him a solid founda- 
tion in the structure of the language and a facility in reading, 
and along with this to accustom his ear to the sound of the lan- 
guage when spoken — a hearing knowledge rather than a speaking 
knowledge — so that if opportunity offer for him to practice the 
speech he may at least be equipped to utilize this opportunity 
wisely and successfully. This we owe to our pupils ; to the over- 
whelming majority of them, to those who will never have this 
opportunity, we also owe that the courses shall not be shaped 
to the use of the minority at the cost of the others. 

The vitality of the modern languages as a subject in the 
American school depends on none of these externals, but must 
find its source and determine its ultimate measure on the basis 
of the two old, unchanging, and unchangeable factors of educa- 
tion : the value as a training for the mind, as a discipline ; and 
the cultural value. These are the fundamentals ; the practical 
values already mentioned are the accessories ; not to be exagger- 



8 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

ated, not to be neglected; hurtful if they replace, but valuable 
\f brought into proper relation to, the essentials. 

But, says the critic, you are repeating the reasons advanced 
for the study of the classics, and on which the classics are wag- 
ing a fight of uncertain outcome to hold their own in our educa- 
tional system. Can we not choose a better strategic position than 
this, which seems at present to be resulting for them in few vic- 
tories and some reverses? I answer deliberately: No! As sub- 
jects with a commercial, concrete value easily measured in dimes 
and dollars, easily applicable in later life to business ends, the 
languages cannot vie with the natural sciences, cannot even vie 
with history or social science, cannot vie, I may add, with bread- 
making or carpet-laying or gas-fitting or clothes-cleaning. Our 
opportunity lies in joining forces with the defenders of the 
classics for the maintenance of education in its full meaning as 
distinguished from technical and business preparation. The 
natural sciences have educational value as a discipline, but are 
inadequate on the cultural side; historical, political, and social 
science have cultural value, but are inferior to language as a 
discipline. The languages combine the two values as does 
nothing else. It may be that we live in an age and a country in 
which the tendencies are against a full appreciation of our atti- 
tude; the more potent then the demand that we stand unitedly 
and aggressively for the things of which our youth have need. 
We might relax our watchfulness in a nation of idealists, or 
there make way, without loss, for the physicist or the chemist ; 
here we are needed, and here we need, as nowhere else, to stand 
for the best we represent. If we do our duty and if we measure 
up to our mission the outcome is not doubtful. We are at the 
flood-tide of the conditions that have turned our people to the 
material side of life; to build for and to help shape the coming 
conditions is our opportunity, and can alone be our justification. 
The study of the classics has lost, at least relatively, some of its 
extension : is there no connection between this fact and the 
decline, which we hear so loudly deplored, of accuracy and of 
style in the English written in our schools? Has not England, 
where the classics better maintain their rank, a superiority over 



PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION Q 

us in this? And in measuring the causes of the increased 
pressure on the classics as a subject in the schools, we must not 
forget the competition of the modern languages. Our develop- 
ment has meant that they must share their space with us. After 
all, if Greek has largely disappeared, and if Latin has failed 
to strengthen its hold, the total of language work in our schools 
and colleges is far greater than it was a generation back, and it 
is safe to say that the students are giving at least as large a pro- 
portion of their time to language study as they then did. The 
question thus becomes whether we of the modern languages are 
properly fulfilling, shall properly fulfil, our part of the work. 
There is no obligation on us to seek to impinge further on the 
space the classics have occupied. Viewed merely from a selfish 
standpoint, our work is lightened and rendered more effective 
by all the Latin and all the Greek the pupil studies. There is 
obligation on us, and on the teachers of the classics as well, that 
we shall unitedly work to attain the educational ends that we 
believe language study serves ; and upon us there rests the duty 
of serving these ends as effectively as they. If it be true that 
the students' grasp of English is showing diminution, it lies 
with us to question gravely whether we of the modern-language 
group are accomplishing the part we have assumed in language 
work as effectively as the classic teacher. 

So far as regards cultural value, the study of the speeches of 
modern Europe affords opportunities that are equal to the best. 
The broadening influence of contact with the thought of other 
nations through the medium of the original language lies, first, 
in the close connection between thought and its form of ex- 
pression. Each people has its own sequence of ideas, its own 
stylistic forms, its own shadings of vocabulary. Attempts at 
literal rendering give only translations devoid of artistic quali- 
ties and incapable of renewing in the reader the impression the 
writer is seeking to transmit. Truly good translation, on the 
other hand, involves the thorough recasting of the foreign form 
of expression, and, while the result may be a correct rendering 
of the thought, expressed in excellent English, such an interpre- 
tation is a triumph for the translator rather than for the trans- 



IO THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

lated. Goethe seated at our side, speaking in flawless English of 
today, would be a wonderful table-companion, but could never 
carry us out of ourselves into a new realm of thought and feel- 
ing as can the Goethe of Weimar. 

The second great opportunity for culture from the study of 
foreign languages consists in the insight this study gives, not 
alone into the literature, but into the life, the social structure, 
the art — into the whole civilization of those who think and 
feel in other ways than we, and whose thoughts find expression 
in other words and in other acts than ours. Here is where Ger- 
man or French, Italian or Spanish, is a priceless domain. Much 
as the archaeologist has learned, familiar as we are with many 
details of the life of the past, our knowledge of the nations that 
have ceased to be cannot compare with the insight we can gain 
into the civilization of our neighbors; and the power to make 
our subjects living, vivid realities is mightily augmented by fa- 
miliarity with habits and surroundings and by nearness in time 
and place. The man of culture is not merely he who knows the 
thought, the feeling, the art, the life of others; though possessed 
of the widest knowledge, he is still narrow who interprets all 
things in terms of his own attitude, who remains ever — how hard 
this to escape! — the center of his universe. The hall-mark of 
culture is the power to see with the eyes of others, to compre- 
hend even where we do not acquiesce, to interpret not in our 
terms but in the terms of him who speaks. A man of culture, 
taking his Don Quixote from the table, becomes straightway a 
Spaniard of the olden days. Let another try to read, Don Qui- 
xote remains a keyless puzzle, or is solved in terms of a Sam Jones 
or a Coxie. A man steeped in French thought and life is likely 
to find, when speaking in French, that the substance as well as 
the form of what he says is at times altered: that he is thinking 
and speaking from the French point of view, and is saying things 
it does not come to him to say when his medium is English. 
When in Paris do as the Parisians do is a safe precept only if 
we choose the right Parisians as our models ; but when in Paris, 
whether in body or spirit, look if you can on things Parisian 
through the Parisian's eyes. The acquisition of power of self- 



PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION . II 

detachment, so difficult to attain, so contrary to the spirit of 
provincialism, of chauvinism, is furthered in no way better than 
by an intimate knowledge of peoples who reject much that we 
accept and accept much that we reject; yet who live in our day, 
have the same general material, moral, and intellectual problems 
to face, and are meeting them at times not so well, at times 
better than we. This is a kind of contact with things new which 
adds not alone to our resources but to our resourcefulness. 
, - There is a further broadening effect of language that carries 
with it far-reaching results when the languages are those of our 
contemporaries. Small-minded confidence in superiority over 
those who do not speak and act and think as we is bred of 
ignorance and cannot long resist the admiration which comes 
with a knowledge of the best in their literature and life. And 
on this follows a diminution of the hostility between nations and 
a strengthening of the forces that are at work for peace. Keen 
international rivalry for political and commercial supremacy 
cannot but continue to occasion enmities, but every pupil whom 
we bring to understand the language and the thought of a foreign 
country gives an added impetus to the growing spirit of friendli- 
ness and conciliation. 

Now, .granted that the study of the modern languages has 
the requisites for satisfying this, the cultural requirement in edu- 
cation, what is its fitness as a discipline ? No one would question 
that it furnishes valuable training for the mind, that it develops 
the reasoning powers; but is it at all to be compared in this 
respect with the study of the classic languages? Many will be 
disposed to agree with Mr. James Bryce, who, in a recent ad- 
dress at the Johns Hopkins University, gave the preference to 
the languages rich in inflections. Still, I believe it is not too much 
to maintain that French or German, when properly taught, may 
be made as effective a discipline for the mind as Latin or Greek. 
A rich inflectional system does undoubtedly furnish an excellent 
basis for drill in grammatical relations, a drill all the more valu- 
able as an incentive to thought because it is lacking in English 
and thus forces the pupil to acquire forms of analysis to which 
he is unaccustomed. Yet, on the other hand, while the differ- 



12 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

ences of the modern European languages from the English are 
often of a type which does not so quickly show on the surface, 
they are none the less innumerable, and the very fact that in 
many cases they do not disclose themselves at the first glance 
is an aid, in the hands of a careful teacher, to training in accurate 
thought. The opportunity for this training begins with the first 
lesson in pronunciation. It remained wholly unutilized under the 
old system of teaching, when the foreign sounds were simply re- 
placed by their nearest English equivalents, and when such 
sounds as have not even a faint reflection in our language were 
explained by incorrect descriptions or crude directions such as 
these: "The French u has a sound precisely agreeing with that 
of the German modified u" ; "To pronounce French u, start as 
if you were going to say oo and quickly say ee." How many 
times, as a boy, I strove to put these directions into practice, 
invariably ending up with an English u or an English el Today, 
proper instruction in pronunciation begins with an analysis of the 
speech-organs for each sound, accompanied by constant illustra- 
tion and practice ; next moves on to explanation and practice in the 
methods of syllable-building and stress; and can then be readily 
extended to the word or the word-group. Such clear and simple 
treatises as Nyrop's Manuel phonetique du frangais parle furnish 
a guide to the teacher, while the charts of German and of French 
sounds prepared in accordance with the system of the International 
Phonetic Association provide the essential classroom apparatus. 
The inculcation of new sounds by a study of the positions of the 
speech-organs is not only the sole way to teach correct pronuncia- 
tion to such pupils as have passed beyond early childhood, it is 
also a valuable training in applying the powers of observation 
and analysis to a set of activities which the individual, in spite 
of the fact that it is he who is performing them, rarely observes, 
and which he can interpret correctly only after attentive and in- 
telligent effort. 

Again, while it is customary to consider the French as poor 
in inflections, comparison of similarities and differences between 
the French and the English offers a field limited rather by the 
inflexibility of our thought than by a real absence of inflection 



PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 13 

in the French. It is easy to see that homme, singular, and 
hommes, plural, are identical in sound, and it is in itself a valuable 
drill to teach the pupil to distinguish between mere eye-differ- 
ences and those which have a real existence in the spoken word ; 
but it is misleading to teach that "man" and "men" are alike 
homme[s] ; "man" is un homme, "men" is des hommes; "the 
man" is V homme, "the men" is les hommes. The un, des, le, les 
are inflections just as are homin-em, homin-es. Similarly, in je 
chante, tu chantes, il chante, elle chante, the je, tu, il, elle are 
inflections, as is shown by the fact that if we really desire to 
express the pronoun subject it must be done in some other way. 
II chante is not "HE sings," but chanter, third singular present, 
and we have to depend on the context to determine whether the 
subject is "he," "it," or a phrase or clause following the verb. 
The Old French, which had more flectional suffixes, did not need 
to express such a je, tu, il; it could say simply chant, chantes, 
chantet. In the modern French, when we are aiming really to 
express a pronoun subject we do it by saying: moi, je chante; 
je chante, moi; c'est moi qui chante, etc. French is not stricken 
with inflectional poverty; it simply has replaced, in a number of 
instances, suffixes by prefixes, prefixes which are in the writing 
still detached but which are none the less prefixes. The Latin 
suffixes -0, -as, -at, etc., probably arose by the merging of what 
were in the first place detached words. The French future tense 
arose in the same way, and je chanterai was originally cantare 
habeo. Similarly enlever, "to carry off," shows a merging into 
one word of elements that still remain separate, for the written 
language at least, in the exactly similar s'en aller, "to move off." 
It is only a superficial observer, however, who sees in in- 
flections the sole or even the main opportunity for language drill. 
They are valuable for this purpose ; but they tend, when not in- 
telligently handled, to become a mere mechanical exercise. It 
is the broader fields of syntax and word-signification that offer 
the most numerous and the most alluring occasions for training 
in exact thinking. Syntactical study is never simple and never 
easy, but it does not need to be dreary or dry. The psychological 
processes which lead the French to employ the expletive ne; to 



14 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

substitute the historical present or the present perfect for the 
narrative past tense, or the present for the future; the reasons 
which have caused the imperfect subjunctive to fall into disuse or 
which determine the placing of the adjective before or after its 
substantive — these and similar questions give to syntax a reality 
and a vividness that must appeal to the teacher and through the 
teacher can be made to appeal to the scholar. 

Most fruitful of all as a training to exact thought is the study 
of words. In English we group a variety of actions under the 
term "to walk" : it is used, for instance, in the meanings "to ad- 
vance on foot" ; "to advance on foot at a deliberate pace" ; "to 
go on foot"; "to come on foot"; "to move on foot for recrea- 
tion," etc. That is to say, in English we have chosen as central 
idea the method of locomotion, joining with it now one, now 
another connotation which we leave to be determined from the 
context. The French group these ideas differently, distributing 
out the various ideas we have assembled around "going afoot" 
into the other classes where they also belong. It therefore has 
no inclusive verb "to walk" : the method of locomotion is what 
it usually leaves to be determined from the context. "He walks 
up to me" is "he comes to me" ; "I walk up to him" is "I go 
to him," and so on. It is in consequence impossible to translate 
"walk" into French without analyzing from the context the pur- 
pose or the accessories of the walking; just as it is impossible to 
translate into English the French se promener, "to take recreation 
by moving from place to place," without first stopping to determine 
whether the mode of motion is walking, or riding, or driving. 
This illustration is nearer to being typical than it is to being ex- 
ceptional. Except for the names of simple and concrete ideas, 
word-values rarely coincide in different languages. The sum- 
total of the thought may be the same, but the sentence will be 
made up of materials of different shape, size, and texture. Ac- 
curate translation from English into a foreign language or vice 
versa involves not alone careful analysis of the foreign speech 
but of the mother-tongue as well. 

Phonetics, inflection, syntax, and word-meaning can be util- 
ized at all stages of the study of a language. No less important 



PLACE OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN EDUCATION 1$ 

is the analysis of style, but it can be successfully undertaken only 
with students who pursue their language-work to a point of con- 
siderable advancement. It is perhaps here that we have the most 
to learn from the language-teaching in the French schools. Their 
teaching of style, whether Latin or French be the subject-matter, 
through the analysis, in their courses on text-interpretation, of 
the modes and methods of composition as shown in the best 
writers, plays no small part in the remarkable facility the French 
show in expressing themselves clearly, accurately, and in good 
form — a facility notable in our youth, as a rule, only by its 
absence. In our graduate French work at the Johns Hopkins 
University we are endeavoring to develop this type of study, so 
that the teachers we send out may go forth adequately equipped 
in this regard. Thus much I may already say, at an early stage 
of the experiment: the students, while finding this work pe- 
culiarly difficult by reason of its newness to them, have entered 
on it with zeal and are enthusiastic over its possibilities. 

In the foregoing discussion of the opportunities offered by 
the modern languages for the forming of trained thinkers I 
have restricted my illustrations to French because of my greater 
familiarity with that subject. Those who are working in German 
can readily supply as potent examples drawn from that language. 
In fact, the problem is not whether the modern languages furnish 
sufficient and satisfactory material for study that shall meet the 
highest cultural and disciplinary standards; it is rather how, in 
the time at our disposal for teaching these languages, we can 
find a place for giving to the pupil even a small part of the 
wealth of training for which they furnish so abundant opportu- 
nity. We deal with a subject-matter capable, by its variety and 
richness, of being rendered the most useful and the most absorb- 
ing in our curriculum. 

The goal is inspiring. Do we at present ever attain this goal ? 
Alas, the knowledge and wisdom and faith the teacher needs, 
whatever his subject, so far exceeds the best we have, the best 
that many of us can hope to have ! More practical and more es- 
sential is the question: Are we aiming for this goal? Are we 
utilizing our present equipment to the best of our ability? Are 



1 6 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

we enlarging it in every possible way? Are we endeavoring to 
give the pupils, in so far as it is practicable, familiarity with the 
modern languages in their written and spoken form, insight into 
the civilizations that are reflected through them, training that 
comes from their analysis? It is for each of us to answer for 
himself and to himself. But this much can be said : The rewards 
of teaching are not such as lure men and women of low ideals 
or material aims; life is a treadmill to the routine teacher, a 
nullity to the teacher who is no idealist. There is ground for 
faith in our teachers. We are full of defects — who knows that 
we are not as often disappointing to our pupils as they are to us? 
— but in no profession is there a greater devotion to the work 
for the work's sake, a greater desire to do the work well for the 
reward that comes in the sense of work well done. With this 
spirit directing the body of our teachers, we may have confidence 
that the gain in intensiveness in the teaching of the modern lan- 
guages is destined more nearly to keep pace with their present 
rapid extension in our schools. The power lies within our grasp 
of aiding to form a new generation broader in culture, clearer 
and more exact in thought; not alone more comprehensive in 
their grasp of languages, but masters of the written and the 
spoken word of their own language as they could never have been 
without our aid. May it be granted to us to have a share in 
bringing this to pass! 



II. AIMS OF THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 1 



JOHN SCHOLTE NOLLEN 
Lake Forest College 



We all agree that the ideal of the course of study in a foreign 
language is a "practical command" of the language: which 
means, of course, a good pronunciation, the ability to under- 
stand the spoken language, and conversational facility in its use, 
the ability to read intelligently and to write correctly. To these 
accomplishments we should add familiarity with the literature 
and the life of the people whose language is being studied. 

It is quite evident that for the American secondary school, 
with its maximum course of four years, this ideal is quite unat- 
tainable. The practical question is how much of the ideal we 
shall be willing to surrender. 

We Americans are exceptionally conservative in our educa- 
tional practice and policy. We have in recent years seen the 
exploitation of many "methods" and "reforms" which were 
guaranteed to reconstruct our modern-language teaching, but 
the actual effect of all this agitation upon the practice of our 
schools has been comparatively slight. Meanwhile, the language 
teachers of Germany and France have actually been bringing 
about a revolution in their methods and their results during the 
last few years. Vietor's little pamphlet, Der Sprachunterricht 
muss umkehren, had an electric effect in calling the attention of 
German teachers to the inefficiency of the old routine, and the 
need of an immediate change of aim and emphasis in the teaching 
of modern languages. Vietor and the other reformers insisted 
that the spoken language must be made the basis of modern- 

1 Outline of a paper read before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club at Ann Arbor, March 
30, 191 1. 

17 



1 8 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

language teaching, and particularly that a correct pronunciation 
of a foreign language must be gained by the persistent use of a 
scientific phonetic method. There is no question that the efforts 
of the reformers have brought about remarkable results in the 
teaching of English and French, especially in the reformed 
schools of Germany. These results have been possible because 
the courses in the German secondary schools are usually six- 
year courses at least, and because the teachers in the German 
secondary schools are thoroughly trained specialists. The em- 
phasis upon the spoken language in both Germany and France 
is fully justified by the great value that the command of the 
spoken language has in these countries. 

It is quite evident that the situation in the secondary schools 
of the United States is very different from conditions in the 
European countries. In the vast majority of cases, our sec- 
ondary-school courses in German and French are two-year 
courses; the maximum, naturally, is the four-year course; and 
even a one-year course is not infrequent. Furthermore, the 
secondary-school teacher in the United States is in general very 
inferior in equipment and experience to the teacher in France 
and Germany. Again, the ability to speak a foreign language 
has comparatively little actual value for the great majority of 
secondary-school pupils in this country. 

Conditions being what they are, I am convinced that in this 
country the widest and the largest utility will be found in the 
ability to read the foreign language. 

How, then, does the study of modern languages differ from 
that of the so-called "dead" languages? For our purposes it 
does not differ so widely as is usually supposed. The differences 
are mainly these: that a reading knowledge can be gained far 
more rapidly in a modern language than in an ancient language, 
and that in the case of the modern language it is, of course, pos- 
sible to vivify the teaching of the language of literature by the 
use of the colloquial tongue. 

Next in order of importance to the ability to read a foreign 
language I should place a really good pronunciation, so that the 
student may be able to body forth concretely the language he is 



MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 19 

reading. Next to this I should place the ability to understand 
the spoken language, and last of all (under circumstances ob- 
taining in the United States) the ability to write and to speak 
the foreign language. 

There can be no question, I think, that to the great majority 
of high-school pupils the language of German or of French litera- 
ture is far more important than the "living" language of spoken 
intercourse. In the ardor of their attack upon the old regime 
the phonetic reformers have usually overshot the mark; in their 
insistence upon the primary importance of the colloquial tongue 
they are apt to forget that the language of literature is just as 
truly and completely a language as that of colloquial intercourse. 
The written or printed symbol is no less a symbol than the sound 
it is intended to express, and it would be both unscientific and 
practically absurd to deny the immense and preponderant value 
of the printed symbol in the development of our civilization. 
And, furthermore, our age is, above all others, a reading age. 
You remember the eloquent passage, "Ceci tuera cela," in Vic- 
tor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, in which the author celebrates 
the gradual and irresistible triumph of the printed page over the 
mediaeval art of Gothic architecture. The , printed page has 
overwhelmed not only the symbolic language of the Gothic ca- 
thedral, but also in these latter days the more closely related arts 
of oratory and conversation. Far from being a mere "fossil," 
as Henry Sweet pretends, the language of books has become the 
principal and almost exclusive storehouse of the riches of our 
modern culture. We are therefore not merely making a con- 
cession to the crudeness of our educational machinery in empha- 
sizing the primary importance of the ability to read a language ; 
we are rather emphasizing that which has after all the greatest 
educative value in the subject we are discussing. 

Referring now to the limitations imposed by practical condi- 
tions, we must make a difference in the aims of the teaching of 
modern languages in our secondary schools according to the 
preparation of the teacher, according to the constituency of the 
school, and according to the length of the course. 

The great bane of language teaching in this country is still 



2 o THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

the ill-trained teacher. So long as the present decentralized and 
irresponsible lack of system in the management of our schools 
continues we shall make but slow progress in improving this con- 
dition. In any case, however, we may demand that the instructor 
should be conscious of his own limitations and should not at- 
tempt to teach what he cannot himself do. This warning seems 
so self-evident that it should not be necessary to insist upon it. 
My experience as a high-school visitor, however, has taught me 
that there are at present a great many high-school teachers of 
French and German in this country who do not meet this ele- 
mentary requirement of self-knowledge, and in very many 
instances I have heard teachers undoing, by the solecisms of their 
spoken utterance, the grammatical training they were at the same 
moment attempting to impart. Unquestionably our American 
teachers in general are weakest in phonetic training and in the 
power to handle the spoken language. For teachers who are 
weak at these points the only allowable method is a strict "read- 
ing method." Fortunately, even such teachers may feel that if 
they succeed in giving their pupils the power to read ordinary 
German or French intelligently they will be giving them that 
which is after all of greatest value in the teaching of a foreign 
language. 

The constituency of a school may call for special emphasis 
upon conversational ability. In such a case it is legitimate for 
the school, so far as in it lies, to supply the public demand, but 
it will be well for the teacher to remember that the pedagogical 
value of conversational facility in itself is comparatively low. 
We all know that "linguistry," even of the most expert kind, 
is not necessarily a mark or a guarantee of culture. 

The length of the course offers us our next practical con- 
sideration. 

Two years should be the irreducible minimum of a high- 
school course in a foreign language. The one-year course in 
the high school is an absurdity. Even in the case of the two- 
year course, the limitation of the time necessarily reduces the 
phonetic and grammatical basis of the course to a minimum 
and lays the stress heavily upon the reading of texts. This result 



MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE SECONDARY SCHOOL 21 

is indicated the more clearly by the fact that usually the shorter 
course is in the hands of comparatively ill-prepared teachers. 

In the four-year course a well-trained teacher may properly 
give the class scientific phonetic training as the basis of its work 
in pronunciation, make large use of the spoken language in the 
classroom, develop the grammatical relations of the language 
in a more leisurely way, with much use of induction and of repe- 
tition, and develop freie Reproduktion, first spoken and then 
written, in the class. Yet the main object even here must remain 
to give the student a mastery of the German and French of litera- 
ture, and an acquaintance with some specimens of good lit- 
erature. In no high-school course is there any proper place for the 
traditional "composition" that means dictionary translations and 
the solving of puzzles. 

Some acquaintance with the life of the foreign people whose 
language the student is learning should be gained through the 
choice of appropriate reading-matter, which is now being sup- 
plied in good quantity, by the use of pictures, of the stereopticon, 
and, wherever possible, of the moving-picture, which marks a 
great advance in the art of placing concretely, before young 
people especially, the living realities of many countries. 

Finally, the modern-language teacher should keep in mind 
all the possibilities of correlation of his work with that of the 
other language departments in the high school. The lack of uni- 
formity in terminology and in method between the allied depart- 
ments of our schools is one of the great practical absurdities of 
our educational system, and very much remains to be done in 
our high-school teaching to emphasize the essential unity and 
congruity of all our human interests. 

I cannot refrain in a final word from recommending to high- 
school teachers the reading of two books: The Practical Study 
of Languages, by Henry Sweet, and The Teaching of German 
in Secondary Schools, by E. W. Bagster-Collins. Sweet is an ex- 
cellent representative of phonetic reform, and Bagster-Collins is 
eminently sane and American in his practical suggestions. 



III. THE NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 1 



V 



A. F. KUERSTEINER 
Indiana University 



In speaking of the needs of modern-language instruction we 
must distinguish between college teaching and high-school teach- 
ing, for the problems in the two cases are quite different. It is 
strange to hear people talk about the natural method and the 
direct method, and other methods intended for the young, and 
wonder why the college teacher does not employ them. The 
fact that when men and women get beyond a certain age their 
memories have grown weaker, their powers of imitation less ef- 
fective, while their desire to reason about things has grown 
stronger, seems to be entirely overlooked. In the teaching of 
any subject the element of age is of great importance, and it 
is unwise to discuss a method unless you first indicate clearly at 
what age you expect to have the method applied. Among all 
the subjects ordinarily taught in our schools this observation 
is particularly applicable to languages, for two reasons : first, 
because memory is called on to a greater degree than in any other 
subject; and second, because in the case of languages we are try-' 
ing to teach an art and not a science, which is true of no other 
subject except manual training and English composition. 

The study of languages, then, calls primarily for memory 
and for imitation; it is reasonable, therefore, that it should be 
pursued at an age when memory is still strong and imitation still 
comes easy. This seems so simple a principle that one wonders 
why it is not followed in our American schools. One wonders 
why the Americans, who pride themselves on their practical 
good sense, follow the tremendously wasteful system of teaching 
the elements of modern languages in both the high schools and 
the colleges. And I say wasteful, not merely because of the dupli- 
cation of work, but chiefly because we make a student waste 
time in acquiring, by dint of hard work and wearisome hours, 
what he could have learned much more easily and in much 

' Read at a meeting of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club, March 30, ion. 



NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 23 

shorter time in his high-school course. In other words, the 
American college is compelled to do work which does not belong 
within its domain, work which no European university would 
think of making a part of its regular curriculum. 

I know the answer of many high-school men: "We sympa- 
thize with what you say, and if all our graduates, or even the 
majority of our graduates, continued their education in the 
colleges and the universities there could be little doubt about the 
course we ought to pursue. But remember that the immense 
majority of high-school graduates do not enter college, that we 
must train them for practical life, that what they will need is 
not language, but mathematics, science, and manual training." 
Let us grant, for the moment, the utilitarian theory of public 
education, and let us ask ourselves : How many pupils that do 
not go on with their school education have any use for algebra 
in after-life, how many for Euclidian geometry? Does anyone 
venture to assert that a high-school pupil learns enough of 
physics, or of chemistry, or of botany, to enable him to become 
a mechanical engineer of even a low grade, or a chemist, or a 
florist, or a good farmer? When we come to manual training 
the case is different. It is possible, in a high school, to train a 
boy who has mechanical aptitude to become a good carpenter, 
joiner, smith, or any other kind of skilled mechanic. 

You see the utilitarian theory of education would call for 
little beyond manual training, English composition, and book- 
keeping. English literature the boy or girl does not need. A 
man can make a very comfortable living without any knowledge 
of Shakespeare and Shelley. And so in constructing our high- 
school course we come back to this principle : that the most practi- 
cal things are those which best train the mind and hand, and 
contribute most to the enjoyment of the finer things of life. And 
what are the things which best train the mind? Don't get 
alarmed ; I am not going to outline a high-school course. Even 
if I wanted to, I should not do so, as I feel under too great a 
disadvantage. I shall confine myself to calling your attention to 
a few statements which have recently come to my knowledge. 
You all remember the Committee of Ten appointed by the Na- 



24 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

tional Education Association in 1892, and how it toiled to con- 
struct model high-school courses. I was told by a man who 
labored with this committee that it was interesting to note that 
when the subject of languages came up each language man was 
eager to have his particular language taught in the high school, 
but when the sciences were discussed the science man, as a rule, 
was perfectly willing to have one of the other sciences taught in 
the high school, but preferred that his own science be begun in 
college. To this I may add that there is at least one department 
of science at Indiana University which would prefer to have its 
students come to it without having taken the high-school course 
in that subject. The reason assigned is that most high-school 
pupils are not sufficiently mature to study the subject, and that 
they come to college with ideas which have to be unlearned. 

Sir Oliver Lodge, the principal of Birmingham University, a 
school especially strong in its scientific and commercial branches, 
stated last year that the most crying need of the University was 
a chair of Greek, and a few months later Professor H. A. Miers, 
an eminent scientist and principal of the University of London, 
declared that the best preparation for the study of science was 
the study of languages. Surely, following the lead of such au- 
thorities as these, we are justified in laying down the principle 
that where, in a high school, authorities have the choice of adding 
an elementary language or of adding an elementary science, 
language should have the preference, while in the college the 
opposite rule should hold. 

But what has all this to do with the needs of modern- 
language instruction? You have perhaps already answered the 
question. The most urgent need of modern-language instruc- 
tion is more time. I believe that in the high-school course lan- 
guage instruction should predominate, as it does in the corre- 
sponding schools of Germany and of France. I believe, too, 
that the Committee of Ten was right when it said that "any 
large subject whatever, to yield its training value, must be pur- 
sued through several years and be studied from three to five 
times a week." Every language that is studied in the high 
schools should be studied at least two years, but preferably three 



NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 2 5 

or four years. Even four years is a short enough time. To me 
there is nothing more discouraging than to scan the schedules 
of French lycees and German Gymnasia and see six or seven 
years given to a language, while we, the practical Americans, 
indulge in that most impractical delusion of trying to learn a 
language in two or three years. To be sure, the high-school 
course is only four years long; but some voices have been raised 
advocating the shortening of the grammar-school course by two 
years and extending the high-school course to six years. Is 
this only an iridescent dream? Here, I believe, is a chance for 
some progressive school superintendent in a progressive city to 
make himself and the city famous; but I am afraid to put off 
discussing the needs of modern-language instruction until that 
city reveals itself, lest the modern languages with which I am 
acquainted may by that time have become ancient. 

Modern Languages is the subject of my story, but I beg you 
to believe that I have no quarrel with Latin. I am a believer in 
Latin; I hope that my children will willingly accept its yoke 
when their time comes to take it up. I hope, too, that the teach- 
ing of Latin will by that time have improved so greatly that they 
will be able after a study of four years to read it with some 
degree of fluency. Surely this is not an excessive demand. But 
I also hope that before that time the modern languages will have 
been placed on an absolute equality with Latin. And by equality 
I mean two things : first, that elementary French and German 
shall be banished from our college course just as elementary 
Latin is; and second, that pupils shall be given the same oppor- 
tunity to study French and German as they now have to 
study Latin. Where a pupil now has the option of studying 
four years of Latin, three of German, and two of French, as 
is the case in a few of our high schools, he ought to be allowed 
to study four years of French, three of German, and two of 
Latin; or four years of German, three of Latin, and two of 
French; and so on through the various possible combinations. 
You see I do not believe it desirable to begin two languages at 
the same time. This is, I believe, the principle followed in most 
high schools and colleges. Now it is sometimes argued that 



26 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

inasmuch as Latin is chronologically the first it ought to be 
studied first; that of the three languages under discussion it is 
the most highly inflected, and that for this reason, too, it ought 
to come first, since such a course will render the study of other 
inflected languages easier. Then, too, Latin is the basis of 
French, and so the pupil who has studied Latin will be greatly 
aided in his study of the modern language. But there are just 
as many and just as good arguments for the opposite course. 
To go from the simple to the complex is good pedagogical doc- 
trine ; hence it is better to study the less highly inflected languages 
first and then take up Latin. The chronological argument has 
by itself little weight, although the fact that Latin is at the root 
of French and of a great deal of our own language is worthy 
of consideration. And yet, when we remember that the majority 
of French words no longer have the meaning which they had 
in the original Latin and that many words of the classical Latin 
have left no progeny behind them, the advantages of such a 
course dwindle to small proportions. 

Let us, then, have the modern languages studied side by side 
with Latin in generous competition with each other, for only in 
this way can each of them come to its own. The cost of such an 
arrangement need not be greater than the present one. The high 
school that now has three teachers devoting all their time to Latin 
and German can just as well have one teacher of Latin, one of 
German, and one of French. Once there is true equality estab- 
lished among the languages, the adjustment in the number of 
pupils is likely to follow. This adjustment may take some time 
and be accompanied by some annoyance, but the results will 
amply justify the trouble. 

I beg your pardon for dwelling so long on this one point, 
but the point is worthy of consideration, for it involves not 
merely the success of modern-language instruction but an im- 
portant educational principle as well. Much could be said on 
the desirability of instruction in modern languages, but with this 
I am not at present concerned, and I refrain from pursuing this 
line of thought lest I be led too far away from my subject. I 
proceed, therefore, to speak of some of the other needs of 
modern-language teaching. 



NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 27 

In discussing these other needs we shall not assume that the 
ideal just mentioned has been realized, but we shall recognize 
existing conditions. To begin with, we must recognize the du- 
plication of the work done in the high schools and in the colleges. 
And yet, while the duplication exists, there should be a line of 
cleavage. In the high school the linguistic side should be empha- 
sized, in the college the literary side ; in other words, each should 
attempt with its students that which its students can do best. 
The high-school pupils are hardly ready to appreciate the master- 
pieces of a foreign literature; the college students have, with a 
few exceptions, passed beyond the best period of linguistic en- 
deavor, and should hasten to study some of the great literature 
which awaits them. The high-school pupils can enter more 
readily into the spirit of the language, and will, therefore, when 
they are ready to study the literature, read it with a keener zest. 
They should try to understand the present, they should confine 
themselves to the language of today, and what literature they 
read should be recent. In this I am afraid I may not have your 
assent, but the longer I think of this subject the more firmly con- 
vinced I am that in the high schools nothing previous to 1830 
should be read. By these restrictions I should not wish to ex- 
clude modernized versions of tales and legends. But I should 
exclude the classic drama, both of France and of Germany. It 
may be argued that high-school pupils enjoy Schiller's Wilhelm 
Tell and Moliere's Bourgeois gentilhomme. But the student of 
German or of French who should imitate the language of Wil- 
helm Tell or of Le bourgeois gentilhomme would not be follow- 
ing good models. Imagine a person saying, Ich will sein ein 
freier Mensch, in imitation of Wir wollen sein ein einzig Volk 
von Brudern. Or, suppose you imitate Monsieur Jourdain's cor- 
rect seventeenth-century French and say, Apportez-moi mon 
chapeau et me donnez mes gants. In either case you are guilty 
of a solecism. The high-school pupil's time should be spent in 
reading and learning correct modern French and German. He 
should not be allowed to read language which he may not imi- 
tate. The same objections hold against poetry. Only a few 
simple selections, in which the word order is not violated, should 
be studied. A few songs may profitably be learned, but rather 



28 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

as an expression of the national spirit than as models for imi- 
tation. 

For the college student, on the other hand, the problem is 
quite different. If he has studied French or German thoroughly 
in the preparatory school he is ready to study the literary master- 
pieces, and whether their language be archaic or not no longer 
matters. If he begins the foreign language in college, the lin- 
guistic side need not be emphasized, save for the exceptional 
student, and the content of the literature should be his main ob- 
ject. I beg you to notice that I mentioned the exceptional college 
student. He should be given a chance. Experience has taught 
me that every year, out of one hundred and seventy-five to two 
hundred beginners, there are a few students ( four or five, some- 
times only two or three) who have real linguistic ability and good 
minds. It is from such as these that high-school teachers of 
language should be trained. If put in a class by themselves, they 
can, without giving more time to the linguistic side than the 
other students give, be trained to write the language acceptably, 
to speak it fairly well, and to understand easily the spoken word. 
Such a course entails from two to four extra hours a week on 
the department undertaking it, but such an expenditure of energy 
and money will surely be found to be worth while. 

Since it is to the high schools that the modern languages 
must look for the future, let us consider what ought to be ex- 
pected of the teacher of German or French in a high school. 
I suppose we should all agree in chorus that he ought to be well 
prepared. But what constitutes good preparation? That is 
the question. It will depend on what the teacher should be ex- 
pected to do. 

First of all, the teacher should have a good pronunciation and 
should have had some instruction in phonetics. He should know 
enough about phonetics to understand its application to teaching, 
and not just enough to want to teach his pupils all the little he 
knows. The high-school boy or girl does not need instruction in 
theoretic phonetics. He does need, however, to be taught how 
to produce the various sounds, and to be told at the proper mo- 
ment to open his mouth more, to lower his tongue, to draw back 



NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 29 

his lips, and so forth. He needs careful instruction in pronuncia- 
tion at the very beginning, for if he does not learn to pronounce 
correctly at the outset he never will. It is the one thing that 
cannot be put off, for every word that he is allowed to pronounce 
badly is a step backward. True, this instruction in pronuncia- 
tion is more important for French than it is for German, because 
French sounds have almost no equivalents in English, and be- 
cause French orthography is farther removed from the phonetic 
ideal than German orthography. But let us not imagine that 
the teacher of German can neglect his phonetics. A high-school 
instructor, speaking enthusiastically about Wilhelm Tell, once 
said to me : "How beautiful is the line, Es lachelt der See, er ladet 
zum Bade." This is enough to make a German's hair stand on 
end ; and yet with two slight alterations the pronunciation would 
have been tolerable. Doubtless there are teachers of French who 
sin just as badly. But the point is that teachers of German must 
not believe too implicitly in the phonetic character of German 
spelling. 

The instructor should be able to speak the language he 
teaches. It is interesting in this connection to note that in the 
foreign-language classes of the Reformschulen of Germany the 
language taught is also the medium of instruction. At least, 
that is the principle by which the reformers are guided; "but," 
says Dr. Max Walter, one of the leaders in the movement, "we 
don't want to make a hobby of the principle. If the explana- 
tion by means of the foreign language becomes too involved the 
German word is used, and the pupils are even permitted in this 
case to jot down the German word in their notebooks." Farther 
on in the same lecture he says : "The speaking of the foreign 
language is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and this 
end is a more rapid penetration into the foreign language and a 
better understanding of it." The French, with their tendency 
to carry everything to a logical conclusion, have gone still farther. 
In the government schools the use of French in the German and 
English classes is strictly forbidden, and that, too, from the very 
beginning. I hasten to add that this ministerial decree is not 
entirely satisfactory to the teachers, since they find it extremely 



30 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

difficult to avoid the native tongue in the elementary stages. The 
fact remains, however, that foreign-language instruction is 
carried on without the use of the native tongue, and that in the 
advanced classes this instruction is very good and very satis- 
factory. In Sweden, too, the direct method, as it is called, has 
many enthusiastic and successful followers. It has been intro- 
duced likewise in Switzerland, where I was fortunate enough to 
visit the classes of one of its most successful exponents, Herr 
Alge, of St. Gallen. 

Perhaps you think what the Europeans can do we can do 
also. But can we? There are a few factors which must not 
be forgotten. To begin with, the European children start their 
first foreign language at the age of nine or ten; that is, four or 
five years before our pupils enter the high school. Then they 
devote six periods a week to the work, and they keep at the same 
language for at least six years. Finally, let it be remembered 
that the American child is not required to work so hard as the 
European child. It is obvious that with such differences of con- 
ditions we cannot accomplish as much as the Europeans. 

What can we accomplish without changing our school sys- 
tem? If the teacher can speak the foreign language, he can be^ 
gin in the first year, after the pupils have acquired a small 
vocabulary, to give simple explanations in German or in French. 
The number and extent of such explanations can be gradually 
increased, until by the end of the second year three-fourths of 
the recitation is conducted in the foreign language. In the third 
year the last vestiges of English should disappear from the 
teacher's use, and in the fourth year the pupil will hear nothing 
but French or German in the classroom and will be called on to 
answer in the foreign tongue questions on the texts read. 

Such a plan involves, however, other changes. The number 
of pages of text to be covered by the class will probably have, to 
be reduced. This will not mean a reduction in the vocabulary 
acquired by the pupil, but an increase. For while the pupil will 
see fewer words he will remember more of those that he sees 
and hears used. The grammar work of the first year will be 
much the same as at present, but after the first year the grammar 



NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 3 1 

should be based on the texts read. This is, of course, nothing 
new to many teachers in the East and to some in the West. 

But most important of all is the preparation of the work by 
the teacher. The plan of every recitation must be carefully 
worked out, and the teacher must see to it that in the apparent 
lack of system the pupil receives systematic training. He must 
go back over his notes constantly and see what things he has 
emphasized in the past and what things remain to be emphasized. 
It is not sufficient to confine oneself to imitation of the text with- 
out emphasizing the grammatical side. Such imitation easily 
becomes mechanical. The pupils must be constantly called on to 
express "this" in the singular, in the first person, in the future, 
in clauses after verbs of saying; they must be called on to com- 
plete sentences by inserting the correct form of a noun, ad- 
jective, verb, pronoun, and so on, according to the language 
taught. The vocabulary, too, will need constant watching. Have 
we come across this word before? Did it have the same mean- 
ing? Notice this idiom. Have we had another idiom involving 
the same noun, adjective, or verb? Here is a verb. Can you 
mention any compounds formed from this verb? Again, much 
will depend on the language taught. These questions, too, are 
to be asked in the foreign language. 

Another exercise of great value is telling stories and then 
having the class tell them again, either orally or in writing. Now 
and then some of the Gouin series may be introduced, but to 
teach the whole language by this method I believe to be impos- 
sible, on account of its killing monotony. 

Now all this means an enormous amount of work for the 
teacher, at least during the year that a course is given for the 
first time. But even after the first year the amount of preparation 
required is very great. For this reason the German advocates of 
the direct method found themselves compelled to petition for a 
smaller number of hours of teaching for instructors in foreign 
languages. I may add that I have some inkling of the work in- 
volved, for I have tried off and on all of the things above out- 
lined, except the building up of a vocabulary. 

What results may we expect from this combination of the old 



32 



THE SCHOOL REVIEW 



method and the direct method? We may expect the pupils to 
read ordinary French or German prose directly without trans- 
lating it; to understand the spoken language easily; to write 
simple, but correct, German or French; and the brighter pupils 
will surely be able to speak the foreign language well enough to 
be readily understood. 

It is obvious that translation will not be an important part 
of the course here outlined. Translation from the foreign lan- 
guage into English should not be entirely abandoned. An occa- 
sional and unexpected call to translate will prove a healthy 
stimulus to the pupil who is disposed to shirk an assignment, but 
translation from English into the foreign language should be 
gradually abandoned after the first year, and completely dropped 
after the second. One of the things that I have had to learn, and 
I confess it took me a long time to learn it, is that in order to 
speak a foreign language we do not need so much to learn how 
to translate such and such a word or phrase as to learn what a 
Frenchman or a German would say under given circumstances. 
The German, bitte, and the French, je vous en prie, are not trans- 
lations of "y° u ' re welcome"; they are the expressions that a 
German and a Frenchman use when you thank them. "Sleep 
well," a young German said to me repeatedly on parting from me 
for the night. Now "sleep well" is a correct translation of 
schlafen Sie wohl, but it has, nevertheless, a foreign sound. 
Every teacher of language knows that one of the ideas that it 
is hardest to get out of a pupil's head is that every word must 
have a corresponding word to translate it, especially in translat- 
ing from English into the foreign language. Imitation of the 
foreign text is, therefore, greatly to be preferred. 

I beg you to notice that I have no desire to pose as the in- 
ventor of a new method. I wish merely to indicate that the 
time is coming when we must make different demands on our 
language teachers; when the ideal teacher will be one who not 
merely has a clear understanding of the foreign language but can 
also speak it readily ; and when the goal on which we fix our eyes 
will be the ability on the part of the pupil to read without trans- 
lation, to understand the spoken language easily, and to write 



NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 33 

simply and correctly. But let me, lest I be misunderstood, state 
as emphatically as possible that I do not believe in making the 
ability to speak the language the chief aim. The chief aim should 
be to give the pupil such a grasp of the language that he can read 
with zest and understand readily; and only because I believe 
that this can be best accomplished through the spoken language 
do I favor the use of the spoken foreign language in the class- 
room. Let it be remembered that it is possible for one to learn 
to speak the language of every day without having the ability to 
read literature. I have come across several cases where young 
men and women who had been in the Philippines had "picked 
up" a knowledge of ordinary spoken Spanish and were more 
helpless before a Spanish literary text than a person who had 
studied the language for only a year at home. Last fall a young 
man who had lived in Paris for two years came to Indiana Univer- 
sity. He spoke French fluently, though not correctly; but when 
set to read Le gendre de Monsieur Poirier he floundered about 
helplessly. You see there must be discipline of the mind as well 
as of the memory and of the imitative faculty, and where, as in 
the case of the purely conversational method, this discipline is 
lacking the instruction is worthless. And I use the word "worth- 
less" deliberately. If, on the other hand, the brighter pupils 
learn also to make themselves understood in the foreign language, 
then so much the better. 

But where are the teachers to come from who are to do this 
work? Some of them already exist. The plan I have proposed 
is by no means a new one. In large part it is already followed by 
a number of teachers, though I know of none who carries out 
the plan as a whole. Still, I should not be surprised to learn that 
such teachers exist. But it is certain that the majority of foreign- 
language teachers would scarcely be ready. This the Europeans 
found out, too, when they began to shift to the direct method. In 
some instances teachers were sent to the foreign country at the 
government's expense. While in Paris the last time I met a 
young German and a young Swede who had come in that way. 
Perhaps some of our states will follow the European example. In 
a few of our universities traveling fellowships for language men 



34 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

already exist. I hope the day will soon come when the state uni- 
versities of the West will also be able to offer such prizes. Then 
there are the exchange teachers whom the Prussian government 
receives from us and sends to us through the agency of the Car- 
negie Foundation. Let us hope that the day is not far off when 
a similar exchange will take place between our country and 
France. 

Once the ideal of the foreign-language teacher who can speak 
the language he teaches is before us, it will be the duty of the uni- 
versities to furnish the requisite training, not only on the lin- 
guistic side, but on the pedagogic side as well. And I believe 
it is desirable that this pedagogic training be done by the language 
departments themselves. Let the stress on method not be too 
heavy. Let the goal be set before the student, let him be shown 
the various ways that have been proposed to reach that goal — in 
other words, let him study methods ; but at the same time let him 
exercise his own ingenuity and individuality in the attempt to 
reach that goal in his practice teaching. It is a mistake for the 
professor to map out for his students a model course Method 
is important, but it is not all-important. This statement cannot 
be made too often. Teachers sometimes ask the question : What 
can we do to make the work interesting? The question is a 
legitimate one, but in some instances it almost amounts to asking : 
By what method can I teach with interest what I don't know? 
The all-important thing is that the teacher have a well-trained 
and well-stored mind and — above all — that he keep on storing it. 

And this leads me to my last point. The teacher should be 
a constant reader of the literature whose language he is teaching. 
This seems so self-evident a proposition that you may wonder 
why I should make it. But I beg you to ask yourselves how many 
teachers of Latin read widely outside of their college course and 
outside of the things that they teach. During the four years that 
I taught Latin in a high school there were two of my Latin col- 
leagues in the same school and one in another high school of the 
same city who read Latin constantly. Among all the other ten 
or eleven teachers who were giving instruction in Latin in the 
high schools of that city I could not discover one who gave evi- 
dence of ever looking into a Latin book which was not on his 



NEEDS OF MODERN-LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION 35 

teaching schedule. I do not know whether that particular city- 
is worse than others in this respect, or whether things have 
changed materially since 1894, but I do know that I have since 
then met other teachers of Latin whom I suspected of the same 
delinquency. And I will whisper into your ear that I have met 
even teachers of modern languages who did not seem to be very 
diligent readers of German or French literature. But whatever 
the facts may be, it is evident that wide reading is desirable. No 
dictionary, however excellent, can take its place. The teacher 
who can give an interesting talk of a minute or two on some word 
or expression, who can tell at length a story which is merely indi- 
cated in the notes or which the notes do not mention but which 
bears on a passage that the class is reading, or who, if he can 
do nothing else, can point out that a certain story or a certain 
passage is famous, has a great advantage over the teacher who 
cannot do these things, has a power of stimulus and inspiration 
which he could not otherwise have. But that is not all. In- 
creased familiarity with the language means increased facility in 
reading, which in turn means an increase of intellectual strength ; 
and this intellectual strength that comes from contact with the 
masterpieces of a literature means capacity for better work, 
means the stimulus which comes from new ideas, the germina- 
tion of other ideas within oneself — means a broader and more 
cheerful spirit. And a teacher whose enthusiasm for the litera- 
ture of his language has kindled in his pupils a desire to read that 
literature, who has occasionally given them a peep of the prom- 
ised land, has done inestimable good. If, moreover, by the invest- 
ment of a hundred dollars, some hundred volumes of German 
and French literature within the mental grasp of the pupils can 
be included in the school library, and the pupils be started on 
the road to reading foreign literature, the teacher will have 
reared unto himself a monument more enduring than bronze. 

As I come to the end of my discourse I begin to wonder 
whether I have not been carrying coals to Newcastle, or perhaps, 
in an assembly like this, I should say owls to Athens. But even 
if this be the case I shall not grieve. I know from my own 
experience that a restatement of a question is often useful, and 
so I hope I may be forgiven if I have said many trite things. 



IV. THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 1 



WILLIAM GARDNER HALE 
The University of Chicago 



Two characteristics mark the attitude of our day toward 
educational matters, the first a widely diffused interest in 
such things in general, the second a great scepticism with 
regard to the value of this and that in detail. The spring- 
ing up of new universities, the multiplying of teachers' asso- 
ciations, the establishment of new journals for teachers, are 
among the evidences of the first of these characteristics. Of 
the second, no evidence is needed. The air is full of slurs upon 
one and another phase of collegiate or high-school study. They 
come from every quarter. If you will watch the daily papers 
at commencement time, you will see that few of our commence- 
ment orators, if imported from the outside, fail to point out, 
somewhere in the tide of their eloquence, that the ardent young 
graduate is about to plunge into a cold world in which book- 
learning does not count. If the orator neglects this fertile 
theme, the editorial writer of the local paper is likely to repair 
the omission the next morning, and to insist that young men 
ought nowadays to be so trained that, when they get out of 
school or out of college, they can make a living. And if these 
gentlemen single out any particular kind of studies as exhibiting 
the perfection of inapplicability and uselessness, it is likely to be 
the most distinctive of the humanistic studies — the once en- 
throned Greek and Latin. 

One finds it, of course, natural that, in this general question- 
ing, the things which have been pre-eminent in the past should 

' This paper was prepared, many years ago, for the writer's students at Cornell University. 
It has been read, since then, before a number of associations, the last of which was the 
Michigan Schoolmasters' Club ; at the request of whose officers it is now published. 

36 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 37 

be subjected to the fiercest examination, and not surprising 
that, under the well-known behavior of human thought, 
the presumption should seem to be against them, rather 
than for them. That which has been, has had its day — such is 
the easy conclusion of the unregenerate human mind. That 
which, in the cases that arrest our attention, does not work, is 
bad — such is the equally easy conclusion of the human mind at 
a stage of partial illumination. No kind of proof is more dan- 
gerous. The question has always to be asked, Is the evidence 
fairly complete? Everyone knows of Bachelors of Arts who 
have not the art of making a living. But everyone knows of 
Bachelors of Arts who make a very good living indeed, and, on 
the other hand, everyone occasionally witnesses lamentable fail- 
ures on the part of men who were fortunate enough to start in 
life unincumbered with Greek and Latin. The method of proof by 
the count of heads is an interesting one, and would be fruitful 
enough, if it could be carried far enough. If it could be shown, 
for example, that there is a clearly larger percentage of failure 
among men who have had the collegiate education than among 
those who have not, or among those who have had Greek and 
Latin than among those who have not, then something certainly 
ought to be done in the way of reform. So far as my own 
experience goes, the fact would seem to be the opposite. But 
such views are necessarily personal. Every man judges by the 
heads he happens to notice, with results to his own satisfaction. 
We must try a safer way, not a new one — there is none — but a 
good one. It consists merely in the patient examination of 
familiar ground, and, above all, of our points of view. 

Let us, then, putting aside personal standards of opinion, 
and possible local standards of prejudice, start from the funda- 
mental question, What is education, and how is it related to the 
college curriculum? 

First, let us recognize distinctly that a college education 
does not work miracles. It is a good, but imperfect, means 
of developing an imperfect creature. At the end of it, a 



38 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

young man does not spring forth full-armed and capable, 
like Athena from the brain of Zeus; but he has won, or 
may have won, certain things. These things fall into five 
classes: first, the power of seeing that which is, and inferring 
from it that which must be; second, the power of expressing 
himself with correctness and force; third, a body of interesting 
and useful information; fourth, mental horizons — the intellec- 
tual background of the man's life; fifth, something still more 
precious, which I beg to be allowed to leave for the moment 
unstated. The first, the power of clear seeing and clear think- 
ing, is the result of what is known as "discipline," and may be 
excellently obtained from humanistic studies. You see, and 
must wonder at, my courage. For a long time, no advocate of 
classical education has been safe from ridicule when he has 
urged the disciplinary value of the study of Greek and Latin. 
That claim is so old as to sound absurd. Curiously enough, 
exactly the same claim is made for their subjects by our friends 
and colleagues of the natural sciences, and, coming from this 
new quarter, is listened to with the respectful attention which it 
deserves. By and by, that too will be an old story, and then 
we shall have a fairer attitude toward the whole matter, and a 
recognition that whatsoever study, in itself not too easy, pre- 
sents phenomena to be observed, and inferences to be drawn, 
affords so good a field for discipline, of one kind or another, that 
the question of the choice should turn rather on other considera- 
tions. Leaving this topic for the moment, then (I shall return 
to some aspects of it a little later), let us consider the remaining 
four — the acquisition of the power of expression, the acquisition 
of a body of information, the acquisition of an intellectual back- 
ground, and the fifth, from which the curtain has not yet been 
drawn. 

With regard to the acquisition of the power of expres- 
sion, I fancy few words are necessary, so far as the ma- 
jority of humanistic studies, those that deal with litera- 
ture, are concerned. It is obvious that they are in their very 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 39 

nature fitted to develop this power, since a considerable part of 
the work in them is devoted to a study of the form of expression 
of the original, and a re-expression of the same ideas in the 
mother-tongue. The importance, likewise, of the acquiring of 
this power is universally conceded. It would be sufficient to 
refer to the position taken by the Leland Stanford Junior Univer- 
sity, in the matter of a requirement in English. That university 
holds that one study is as good and as dignified as another, and 
that, in consequence, no study should be required, the choice of 
his course being left wholly to the student. With illuminating 
inconsistency, however, the University requires English of every 
student, both before and after entrance; and, since the aim of the 
Leland Stanford University is avowedly practical, we are bound 
to suppose that back of this requirement lies the conviction that 
the power of expression in the mother-tongue is of prime prac- 
tical importance. 

We come next to the matter of the body of interesting and 
useful information acquired in school or college. Before we 
take this up, however, we must draw a sharp line of demarca- 
tion, and be willing, in looking at prevailing systems, to spend 
a few minutes in seeing them in their historical place and con- 
nection. 

There are two distinct kinds of education, corresponding 
to two distinct aims. There is, on the one hand, the edu- 
cation that aims to prepare the young man or young woman 
to do, with intelligent skill, certain things, more or less 
manual, through . which a livelihood may be obtained — the so- 
called industrial education. The race among the nations of the 
civilized world turns, to a very important degree, upon the 
opportunities afforded to their young men of "practical" tastes, 
as the misleading phrase is, to learn, under skilled instruction, 
the things which in our country are mostly learned in the hap- 
hazard school of raw labor. Closely allied to this, but requiring 
a higher stage of intellectual development, and offering oppor- 
tunities of brilliant careers to the most gifted, is the technical 



40 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

education, the outcome of our splendid material civilization, 
and the pledge of splendors yet to come. To this, also, I 
concede every claim but one. It is impossible to overrate the im- 
portance either of the industrial or of the technical training, so 
long as your method of urging that importance is not by assert- 
ing the uselessness of other things, belonging to a wholly differ- 
ent aim and wholly different kind of life. 

At the opposite extreme from the industrial and technical 
lies the so-called liberal education. It arose, or rather arose 
a second time, in the Rebirth of Europe, which began some 
six centuries ago. At the root of it lay a growing senti- 
ment, to which the name of Humanism came later to be 
given. The sentiment, the idea, are substantially the same 
today as then, and we shall clear our conceptions of education 
by seeing what the essential nature of this movement was. 

The slender thread of intellectual life had been carried 
on from Roman times by the churchmen and expounders 
of the law; and, through the former in particular, the 
Latin classics had been preserved, while the ability to write 
a certain kind of Latin had all along been a necessity to both 
classes. Knowledge of the Greek tongue, however, had wholly 
disappeared from western Europe. I shall not attempt to trace 
the causes of the movement which led to the beginnings proper 
of the illumination. There was, of course, no sudden appear- 
ance in the world of something wholly lacking before. Nature 
does not work by leaps. But there was one man in whom the 
new spirit was so pre-eminently strong that he is beyond ques- 
tion the father of modern thought — the poet Petrarch. 

Brought up to be a lawyer, Petrarch was trained in the 
Latin of his time, and his enforced taking of holy orders 
in his desire to lead a literary life doubtless was a still 
greater help to him in his study of Latin writers. This 
study was, of course, not due to the influence of any "college 
fetich," to use a phrase made famous by Mr. Charles Francis 
Adams : it was the result of a serious passion. In his authors, 
and especially in Cicero and Virgil, Petrarch found that which 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 41 

was food to his soul. A journey to Rome wrought upon him 
that indescribable spell which it has produced since upon a Goethe 
and a Winckelmann, and which it produces upon every traveler 
of today that carries a soul with him. A visionary and en- 
thusiast, a lover of the wild and romantic in nature, Petrarch 
established himself some time later in the solitude of Vaucluse, 
where he led for four years a life of study, devoting himself to 
Roman literature and history, and preparing for his Latin epic 
poem Africa. The fame of his writings brought him the laurel 
crown at Rome, which he received upon the Capitol, with solemn 
ceremonies, in the year 1341. The oration which he delivered 
is notable in the history of the human spirit. His text was the 
words of Virgil, from the third Georgic, verses 291-92: 

Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis 

Raptat amor: 

"But, as for me, the sweet love of Parnassus 

bids me hasten on through steep and desert 

ways." 

The ceremony was not new. Others before Petrarch had been 
similarly crowned, in other cities of Italy. But Rome, though 
she was now the seat of neither emperor nor pope, was still, in 
the imagination of men as in their memories, the mistress of the 
world. It was fitting that, upon the spot most solemnly associ- 
ated with her ancient grandeurs, the man who was to evoke 
again the life of art and science should deliver his defense of 
letters, and summon men once more to the heights of Parnassus, 
so long deserted. Upon the Capitol at Rome, antiquity that day 
passed on its wealth to the emerging spirit of the modern world. 
In the next year, Petrarch attempted the study of Greek, 
having for his teacher a Calabrian, long resident in Greece, 
the first of those Greek scholars who played so important 
a part in the new life. Petrarch began, as he himself 
tells us, with great alacrity, but the difficulty of an entirely 
strange tongue, and the early departure of his teacher, cut short 
his purpose. Yet he divined the value of Greek, and it was 



42 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

partly through his encouragement that a younger friend and 
intimate, Boccaccio, prosecuted the study, and helped to make 
it possible for others to prosecute it. It is worth noting, as we 
pass, that our modern classical studies begin with the two first 
great names in modern literature. Classical education is not, as 
is so often said, descended from Mediaevalism. It is descended 
from the revolt against Mediaevalism. 

The study of Greek did not get on very fast at the 
outset, and Petrarch says in one of his letters to dead 
authors, as we should call them, now that Andrew Lang has 
reinvented them — a letter addressed to Homer — that there were 
at that time not above ten persons in Italy who knew how to 
value the old father of the poets; five at the most in Florence, 
one in Bologna, two in Verona, one in Mantua, one in Perugia, 
but none at Rome. This seems a slow beginning; but in the 
fifteenth century, when the movement was fairly started, the 
"Revival went on with marvelous rapidity. There was an ardent 
study of Greek and Latin, a hunting-up of manuscripts and a 
copying and disseminating of them, a writing of expositions, 
of grammars, of histories, of compilations of antiquities. 
Popes, princes, bankers aided the new activity. The lecture- 
rooms of the Italian universities were crowded with eager hear- 
ers. The spirit of a new crusade, a crusade of the intellect, had 
come upon the world. Then followed, with the invention of 
printing, the rapid multiplying of classical texts. The new 
activity spread to France, Germany, and England. The profes- 
sors of rhetoric, as they were called, expounded, in crowded 
lecture-rooms, Greek and Roman grammar and philology, re- 
ligion and customs, numismatics, philosophy, mythology, law, 
and institutions — the classical curriculum of today — with means 
of investigation imperfect as compared with ours, but with a 
zeal as great as would that ours were ! This was some hundreds 
of years ago. We are doing the same now. Why should we 
occupy ourselves, in this busy new world, with the things that oc- 
cupied men when the continent in which we live was unknown ? 

Another question must be asked and answered first. What 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 43 

was the spirit that animated the Revival? For if that 
spirit is still the true one, then, no matter how old it may 
be, we should only be going astray from human nature by 
departing from it. It was the spirit which recognized the dig- 
nity and power of man — a conception vastly different from that 
which had obtained in the Middle Ages. Hence its name of 
Humanism. Unconscious at first what its mission of disinte- 
gration and reconstruction was to be, it exercised human judg- 
ment upon life. It looked with fresh interest upon this world. 
It read a great and hopeful lesson in that which humanity had 
accomplished in Greece and Rome before the coming of Chris- 
tianity. It longed to become again creative, as antiquity had 
been creative in the still visible remains of art and literature. 

The movement was not, mark you, an attempt to save 
the old, but the bursting forth of new life which found its 
food and inspiration in a great past. It threw off the bur- 
den of what was false in the religious and political concep- 
tions of the Middle Ages. It was a revolt against asceticism, 
or the belief that God intends His children to be happy only in 
the hereafter. It was a revolt against mysticism, and in favor 
of rational inquiry. It went too far, like many another good 
impulse in the development of man, and in parts of Europe, 
especially in Italy itself, came near to return to the paganism 
on which it fed. But it was essentially sound; and out of it 
was born the Reformation, as truly a fruit of the Classical 
Revival as was the classical curriculum itself. Out of it, too, 
was born modern science. For the first break with mediaeval 
science came through the works of medicine, medical botany, 
and anatomy, translated and edited from Hippocrates, Galen, 
and Dioscorides by Italian, French, German, and English physi- 
cians. 

To put the matter briefly, then, the humanistic spirit, first 
showing itself clearly in Petrarch, asserted the dignity of man, 
the interest of this world, and the right of free inquiry. And 
with these assertions went a passionate love of the highest prod- 
ucts of the human spirit, namely, literature and art. 



44 



THE SCHOOL REVIEW 



Then we are ready to say why we are occupying our- 
selves with the same things as these professors whose voices 
have been still these hundreds of years. It is because their 
animating purpose corresponds to an eternal fact. Man, and 
the records of his spirit, then constituted, and must for- 
ever constitute, the object of supremest interest to man. 1 
do not mean that there are no other objects of interest. We are 
invested, as a race, with a boundless desire to understand the 
world in which we find ourselves. The habits of the ant, O'f 
the flower, of the bee, of chemical reagents, of moving forces, 
find men in abundance to study them with the zeal of investi- 
gators, and students in abundance to learn from these investi- 
gators. But the claim that any of these things, the ant, the bee, 
the chemical reagent, is a more worthy object of interest, or an 
actually more interesting object, than the human mind, is a pre- 
posterous one. I haven't a word of complaint for the man who, 
for himself, finds the ant-hill or the bee-hive a more attractive 
product of life than Hamlet or Faust or the Idyls of Theocritus. 
But if such a man says, or if his students say, that for the great 
mass of young people these things are intrinsically more inter- 
esting, then I have only to answer that, in the nature of things, 
that which is of the greatest and most permanent concern to the 
average man must be the character, behavior, and accomplish- 
ments of the most highly developed and richly equipped of this 
world's products,^namely, mankind — the object of humanistic 
studies. Pope allowed himself a poet's overstatement when he 
wrote "the proper study of mankind is man." But what he 
meant was substantially true. All those studies, then, that enable 
us to understand the mind and heart of man will be of interest 
to men in a non-technical education. Among such subjects is 
obviously history; and, happily for us, while the materializing 
tendency of our wonderful outward civilization has attacked 
everything else that deals with the past, it has, nevertheless, 
with salutary inconsistency, not felt that we could completely 
understand the America of today by beginning with the Phil- 
ippine War, or with the Civil War, or with the War of 1812, 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 45 

or with the Declaration of Independence, or even with the 
Landing of Columbus. Not a whit wiser is it to suppose that 
the study of any phase of human activity can begin with that 
which today is. The present can be seen justly only in the 
setting of the record of the race; and there is no record more 
authentic — no record so intimate and so vital — as literature. 
The study of this constitutes the gentler discipline, in which 
the tastes of many are likely to meet. Secondary to it, but 
only secondary, is the study of the workings of the human mind 
as seen in logic, and in the expression of thought in words, or, 
in the terms of the schools, in rhetoric and grammar ; and hardly 
secondary, even, is the record of the appreciations and visions of 
the human mind, as seen in art. 

I have for the moment dealt with the question of the 
value of humanistic studies by referring to the intrinsic in- 
terest of such studies. I come now to another point of view, 
and, at the same time, to a perversion of judgment from 
which we, in this country and this age, are especially liable to 
suffer. It is said, and said too often without prompt contradic- 
tion, that the study of mathematics and of the natural sciences is 
practical, is useful, while the study of literatures, of systems of 
speech, of art, is ornamental, having nothing to do with getting 
on in the world. Let us look more narrowly at this assertion. 
An admirable, and, to my mind, an indispensable training is given 
through the mathematics of the school or the college. But, unless 
we are to be engineers or surveyors, what are we to do later with 
our higher algebra, our solid geometry, our trigonometry, our 
conic sections ? The simple fact is that the mathematics of daily 
life consists of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, 
with perhaps a little cancellation — in short, the mathematics, not 
of the college, nor yet of the high school, but of the grammar 
school. So, too, we get interesting and valuable knowledge, 
knowledge of which every student should have some share, in the 
study of physics and chemistry. But unless we are going to be 
mechanicians • or manufacturing chemists, upon what is our 
knowledge of physics or chemistry going to be brought to bear in 



46 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

daily life ? / know, as well as the physicist, that the falling mass 
will crush me, and I get out of the way, though I no longer re- 
member how to calculate its striking power. My fire warms me as 
it warms my friend, the chemist, though I have forgotten, thirty 
years ago, precisely how the invisible gases behave in combustion ; 
and that fire would warm me, even if I had never known. 
I can use the telephone as well as another, though I couldn't pos- 
sibly make one or even repair one. I travel by cars as well as 
any professor of mechanical engineering, though such a professor 
could probably run the engine, while I should need a little pre- 
liminary training. And when I say "I," I might as well say 
''you/' o r people in general who do not devote themselves to the 
technical work of life. The average untechnical man in the world, 
whatever he is finally to do, is distinctly the gainer by the study of 
mathematics and the study of chemistry and physics, and he may 
find in those subjects that which will prove to be the very food 
of his natural individual appetite. But the claim that he will find 
mathematics, physics, and chemistry of practical use to him in 
daily life, is baseless. For the average untechnical man, the prac- 
tical things are far more subtile than these. Putting aside, as 
necessary to acquire, no matter what one studies, the mechanics 
of the mind, namely, the power of accurate observation and 
accurate reasoning from that which is observed, the things which 
will help a man to get on in the world, outside of the manufactory 
and the patent office, are: a knowledge of and ready sympathy 
with men; quickness and flexibility of mind; and the power of 
expressing himself accurately and forcibly. A student of the 
course of electrical engineering in Cornell University, a man of 
excellent ability, said to me at his graduation, that, while he had 
got from his scientific studies the means of making an immediate 
living, yet many of the men in the courses in arts and philosophy, 
who had entered at the same time with himself, had out- 
stripped him in ways that he could apprehend — had grown away 
from him — and that, to just this extent, he felt handicapped in 
the race of life. That was a dim recognition of the practical 
value of the so-called unpractical studies, even in the case of a man 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 47 

who will mostly have to vie with men no more liberally educated 
than himself. 

In all that I have thus far said, I have used the word 
"science" as covering the natural sciences, in distinction from 
the humanities. This is the commonly accepted meaning 
of the word in this country. It is often pointed out that 
the usage is an unfortunate one. I wish to point this out 
again today, and then to call attention to certain things that fol- 
low from a juster conception. 

Webster defines science as "knowledge duly arranged, 
and referred to general truths and principles on which it 
is founded, and from which it is derived." I should like 
myself to define it, more simply, as ordered knowledge. 
Briefly, we may say that science deals with facts, and the reasons 
for those facts ; or, more briefly still, with facts and principles. 
No narrower definition would anywhere be accepted, or, indeed, 
is anywhere accepted. But it is obvious that this is too broad a 
definition to be limited to the range of the natural sciences. 
Wherever there are facts, there may be a recording of those facts, 
and an attempt to understand their relations. Political economy, 
then, though it deals with the behavior of man within a certain 
field, and not with nature outside of man, is a science. Sociol- 
ogy, which likewise deals with the behavior of man within a cer- 
tain field, aims to construct a science. History, which deals with 
the facts of man's experience within limits hard to fix, is a sci- 
ence. Comparative philology, which deals with the forms or the 
syntax of several languages, and attempts to detect the operation 
of principles through which they have come to be what they are, is 
a science. The study of the history of a literature, if it aims to 
trace the development of that literature, and the principles that 
have governed the development, is a scientific study. So is the 
study of Greek philosophy, or of Greek art. So is the 
study of Roman law, or of Roman administration. Further- 
more, it is obvious that the aims and methods which I have in- 
dicated are the aims and methods which have long governed 
all humanistic study whatsoever, so far as the things studied 



48 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

can possibly fall within the reach of scientific method. The 
American Journal of Philology is as much a scientific journal 
as is the journal that bears the name Science. Moreover, the 
spirit of man, with whose behavior the humanities deal, is in 
reality just as much a part of nature as is his body, or as are 
chemical reagents, or the forces which physics measures. 
Strictly and fairly, then, every study that deals with the record- 
ing and explaining of facts is a branch of natural science. Long- 
established usage, however, is hard to overthrow. The unhappy 
antithesis which the philosophers have, for over two thousand 
years, been setting up between man and what they called nature 
has so controlled nomenclature that we must accept the meaning 
now attaching to the latter word, and must be content, therefore, 
to divide the body of science into two parts: the humanistic 
sciences and the natural sciences. 

Let us utilize the distinction by pointing out certain facts 
and drawing certain inferences. 

First: In the ordinary conduct of human life, whether in 
our business or in our other relations with the world, we are 
governed by considerations which do not admit of an abso- 
lutely certain correctness of decision. We see reasons on 
both sides. Perhaps they appear to be evenly balanced. Per- 
haps they seem a little stronger, perhaps they seem a good deal 
stronger, on the one side than on the other. In every case, how- 
ever, where any question at all arises, it is by probabilities that 
we are governed. Nor can we solve our problems by applying 
the actual test of experience before taking our step ; for it is only 
the actual taking of a step, one way or the other, that provides 
us with experience. 

Now the process by which the student of the humanistic 
sciences arrives at conclusions is of a precisely similar na- 
ture. In endeavoring to discover the reasons for facts 
which he has recorded, or which others before him have re- 
corded, say in French syntax, or in Latin syntax, he has first to 
divine a line of proof. Often, after grasping clearly the nature 
of his problem, he is sorely baffled to see along what path to 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 49 

look for evidence — to divine what phenomena would afford evi- 
dence. And, when he has seen this, and reached his evidence, it is 
generally not of a one-sided kind. He has to balance indication 
against indication, and thread his way through complicated con- 
siderations to an ultimate probability, great or slight. Nor is 
this true of the more advanced questions only, with which the 
graduate student may come to occupy himself. It is true, in 
substance, of all the work in the humanistic studies ordinarily 
done in the classroom of college or school. The schoolboy who 
is working out the meaning of a page of Greek or Latin for to- 
morrow's lesson, if he has been rightly trained, is working in 
the same way. In trying to see what his author means, he is 
going through a process of repeated balancing of considerations. 
A given word has, in most cases, a number of possible meanings. 
How can he tell which meaning his author had in mind in speak- 
ing or writing that word ? A given case, a given mood, may have 
two or three or a dozen differing forces. Which force did his 
author mean in this particular case? In order to decide, the stu- 
dent must look for all the possible evidence on the page before 
him, and then balance the various possibilities in the light of this 
evidence. The process of learning to read Greek or Latin is, in- 
deed, when properly taught, a process of acquiring the power of 
rapidly feeling possibilities, and of rapidly weighing them. 

The processes of the study of the natural sciences, on 
the other hand, are, in a large degree, of a different kind. 
Some of the great inductions of science, to be sure, have 
been reached by procedure of a similar character. The theory of 
evolution, for instance, has never been proved by absolute evi- 
dence, nor, in all probability, does it admit of absolute proof or 
disproof. The atomic theory, the glacial theory, rest on the bal- 
ancing of evidence, and belong accordingly to the same class with 
the larger generalizations of political economy, of history, of 
linguistics. But the ordinary work in natural science, as per- 
formed in our schools and colleges, proceeds in a large degree by 
definite and incontrovertible tests. The very merits claimed for 
it, as against the classical training, by such men as the late Presi- 



50 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

dent Francis A. Walker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
nology, lie in the fact that its results do admit of definite tests. A 
hypothesis is laid down. An experiment is then performed, 
which, if rightly devised, will absolutely settle the question one 
way or the other, or, if it does not go so far, will at least com- 
pletely eliminate one conceivable explanation ; after which, other 
experiments will follow, until an absolute result is finally reached. 
This is admirable, and no complete education, in my opinion, can 
afford to dispense with it. But it is not the sort of thing that one 
has to do in practical life, and it therefore does not directly pre- 
pare one for that life. It is, in a word, a less practical training, 
for the average man, than the training given by political economy 
or Greek. If you must be guided by practical considerations in 
the choice of studies, then, unless you are going into technical 
work, the methods of humanistic science will serve you better in 
daily practical after-life than the methods of natural science. 
And, of all humanistic sciences that can have their place in the 
curriculum of the schools, the science that is brought to bear in 
the reading of Latin and Greek is the most effective, because, it 
demands, in a higher degree and with a greater constancy than 
any other, delicate and exact observation, and the rapid weighing 
of large ranges of possibilities. 

I come now to the fifth possible acquisition to be gained 
from education. I remarked, a few minutes ago, that the aims 
and methods of all studies have long been scientific, so far 
as the things studied could possibly fall within the reach of 
scientific method. This reservation is of the gravest importance, 
and is fraught with far-reaching consequences, the moment one 
comes to weigh the question of educational values. For there is, 
in human life, a great field with which science has nothing to do, 
and can have nothing to do ; and to this field a large part of cer- 
tain humanistic studies belongs. The student who is reading the 
Persians of Aeschylus proceeds by a scientific method — largely 
unconsciously by this time, if he has been rightly trained — to 
find out what his author says. But the effect upon him of that 
which his author says is something of a wholly different kind 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 51 

from any recognition of scientific fact. It is the incalculable 
effect produced by noble passion and perfect expression. It is 
precisely this incalculable element that constitutes the supreme 
virtue of the study of literature and art — not because it is incalcu- 
lable, but because it belongs to the finest issues of human life. 
It has no counterpart in science. It is not a matter of the recog- 
nition of law. It is a matter of spiritual and aesthetic perception. 
It cannot be defined. You cannot put it under the microscope. 
People have tried so to seize and study it, but never with success. 
Arnold rightly says: "The mark and accent of beauty, worth, 
and power in poetry of a high quality cannot be defined." And 
the same is true of prose, the moment it goes beyond the stage of 
being a mere vehicle of communication. Literature, then, has 
something to offer, real but unmeasurable, which science has not — 
nay, which even history has not in the same degree; for Aris- 
totle's observation, quoted by Arnold in the same paper, is pro- 
foundly just, that the superiority of poetry over history consists 
in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness. Now 
it is not the man of letters alone that recognizes that literature 
has something to give which is not included in the realm of 
science. Among the few masters whom we all venerate is Dar- 
win. Darwin's scientific sense and power are not to be impeached. 
They grew with him to his latest years; but poetry, which had 
once formed some part of his mental life, became, as he himself 
tells us, less and less intelligible to him. Many men might say 
the same thing with contempt. Darwin was too good a man of 
science to do this, for he recognized that the love of noble litera- 
ture is an actually existing fact, and a means of great and high 
pleasure. Shall I say that the most serious difficulty in the way 
of sound and just judgments in the matter of educational values 
lies today in the fact that many men of the natural sciences, and 
not a few men of the humanistic sciences, fail to recognize that 
which the great master saw? The scientific sense, as such, has 
nothing to do with these matters, and possesses no perception for 
them, whether that scientific sense belong to a chemist, a biolo- 
gist, a political economist, or a Latinist. This is the main reason 



52 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

for the failure to recognize the value of literary studies, and the 
consequent tone of superiority to such studies, too frequently be- 
trayed by the man of science. There are most able and excellent 
persons, business men, doctors, lawyers, professors, who are with- 
out the sense for literature, just as there are most able and excel- 
lent men who are without the sense for music. A second reason 
is our unhappy modern narrowing of the student's preliminary 
training, in consequence of which many a man who possessed the 
latent sense for literature failed to have it developed, or even to 
know of its existence, because his training, at least beyond the 
rudimentary stage, had been in science only. My own sympathy is 
deep on both sides. I know no reason why the satisfactions of the 
scientific sense should be left out of any man's life; I largely, in 
my own field, live in them. But I also know no reason why the 
satisfactions of the imagination and the love of perfect literary 
form should be left out of any man's life ; I could not live happily 
without them. The tendency of our extremists in education is 
to narrow the intellectual life. Narrowness is better than dissi- 
pation, but there is something between these two vicious ex- 
tremes. Education need not be a failure if, instead of aiming at 
unfolding one of the two capacities of the human intellect, 
it aims at unfolding both. 

We have now recognized the distinctive character of cer- 
tain humanistic studies, and are ready to consider what might 
look at first blush to be a severe test of the value of those 
studies. The university which today represents the extreme 
of modern educational theory, as I have already said, is the 
Leland Stanford University. In an article on "The Educational 
Ideas of Leland Stanford," published by President Jordan in the 
Educational Review, September, 1893, there are two succinct 
statements of the purposes of the University. One is in the words 
of the president: "The whole gift is devoted to education pure 
and simple, without any hampering clause, and with no other 
end in view than, through the extension of knowledge, to help 
humanity." With regard to this pronunciamento, I have only to 
remark that, if Mr. Stanford had no other end in view than the 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 53 

extension of knowledge, no matter how well ordered it might be, 
then he meant to leave a large and precious part of the intel- 
lectual life unprovided for. I somewhat fear that the condition 
of things at the university which he founded must for some time 
be largely that which President Jordan's formulation of its pur- 
poses portends. But the founder himself, whether consciously 
or unconsciously, enunciated a larger aim, in words quoted in 
the same article. It is by these words that I am willing that the 
claim of the value of the humanistic studies should be weighed. 
They are as follows : "I would have this institution help to fit 
men and women for usefulness in this life, by increasing their 
individual power of production, and by making them good com- 
pany for themselves and others." The statement is full of homely 
sense. It was clear to Mr. Stanford's practical mind that even 
the getting of a living does not fill the full field of the word 
"practical." The aim of our labor is undoubtedly to acquire that 
which will make life desirable, to increase the rewards of life — 
the praemia vitae. But Mr. Stanford saw that the pleasures of 
food, of warmth, of a well-cushioned chair, of convenient 
methods of locomotion, were not the only praemia vitae. He 
would train us so that we should be good company for ourselves 
and others. Well, then, if I am to be good company for myself, 
who forbids me to be so trained that I may understand, and, un- 
derstanding, may watch with keen interest, the working of the 
Zeitgeist of this century, as it shows itself in the ways and tem- 
per of these United States, of this Canada, and even of England, 
of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Spain? Who forbids my 
finding pleasure in studying the ways and temper of the peoples 
who, a century ago, were shaping our present civilization for us? 
Who forbids me the keenest pleasure in the ways of the rich life 
and thought of Athens, of Alexandria, of Rome, which, two 
thousand years ago, were helping to make our present life? Who 
forbids me to enjoy reading my novelist, my poet, my philoso- 
pher, against a background of a large and varied experience of 
life — gained in part by travel, if possible, but in immensely greater 
part through the records which life has left in history, literature, 



54 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

and art? In the case of another man, you certainly have not told 
me all I wish to know, when you inform me that he is able to 
make ten thousand a year, or fifty thousand, or even some un- 
mentionable larger sum. I still desire to know what he practi- 
cally gets out of life; what his pleasures are ; how much of human 
activity is a sealed book to him. When he has done his 'day's 
work, does he find anything that belongs to him in the books 
which the world holds precious ? If he lives where it is possible 
to see something of art, does he know good painting and good 
sculpture, and feel their charm? Would he, to apply Mr. Stan- 
ford's further test, be good company for me? Is he an 
interesting person, whose way of looking at things I should 
like to know? Does he understand what one means by 
"the intellectual life"? Is he a money-maker alone, or a fine in- 
telligence? Life is not a system of manufactures, except for 
those who have to spend themselves in making our garments, 
grinding our flour, and planning and building our engines. It is 
a sum total of the working of subtile forces — a sum total made 
good and desirable by the untechnical things, first, of course, 
honorable living, and, on a plane lower than that alone, breadth 
of interests and sympathies, backgrounds, outlooks, intellectual 
tastes, appreciation — all those things which belong to the content 
of the much-abused but essentially sound word culture, the bring- 
ing of oneself to the best that one can be. It was because of the 
value of the falsely called unpractical things that Mr. James Rus- 
sell Lowell, himself a great exemplar of a liberal education, said, 
when President Walker asked the faculty of Harvard College, 
many years ago, what their notion of a university was, "A univer- 
sity is a place where nothing useful is taught." As he explained 
in his Harvard Oration of 1886, he did not mean that stu- 
dents were to be tied to this or that, or that any subject should 
be denied them, to which a strong natural bent might lead; but 
that the day should never come when the weightier matters of a 
language, namely, such parts of it as have overcome death by 
reason of the beauty in which they are incarnated, such parts 
as are universal by reason of their civilizing properties, their 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES $5 

power to elevate and fortify the mind, should cease to be pre- 
dominant in the teaching given at the university. "Let the 
humanities," said he, "be maintained undiminished in their 
ancient rights. Leave in their traditional pre-eminence those 
studies that are rightly called liberal; those studies that kindle 
the imagination, and through it irradiate the reason ; those studies 
that manumitted the modern mind ; those in which the brains of 
finest temper have found alike their stimulus and their repose, 
taught by them that the power of intellect is heightened in pro- 
portion as it is made gracious by measure and symmetry." 

Let me now sum. up, in a spirit of moderation, but without 
disguise, the claims which I have made, and in consequence 
of which I believe that, in the advance of education, there 
is no danger that humanistic studies will pass permanently 
into a secondary place. It has been seen that a young man 
or young woman, natural capacity being granted, may acquire 
five things in a college course: discipline; power of ex- 
pression; information; outlook; the sense of the noble and 
beautiful in literature. The first acquisition, the training of 
the mind to accurate action, I have maintained, may be had from 
humanistic studies, and have conceded that it may be had from 
scientific studies. My own view is that both kinds of discipline, 
for different reasons, are necessary, and that something of both 
should therefore be prescribed in that part of education which 
serves as the foundation for specialized elective work. The sec- 
ond acquisition, the power of expression, is obviously, as has 
been said, to be had in larger degree from humanistic studies, 
and in smaller degree from scientific. As regards the fourth ac- 
quisition — to pass the third for the moment — I am entirely will- 
ing to make a concession, which, however, is rather apparent 
than real. The outlook which a man should have upon life is 
certainly incomplete unless he has learned to see nature from 
something like the point of view of modern science. But, in the 
first place, I have asserted that the study of natural science 
should form a part of every education, and I will gladly add 
that it ought to begin in childhood. And, in the second place, 



56 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

it is clear upon an instant's thought that no man who devotes 
any part of his time to reading is in danger of passing through 
life untouched by the spirit of this study. Our newspapers, our 
monthly magazines, are full of it; while one would not get far, 
even if these were safer guides than they are, by trusting to 
them for his conception of ancient life and thought. 

With regard to the third acquisition, that of the infor- 
mation one carries away from college, a point is often 
scored, with supposed telling effect, against humanistic studies, 
and especially against the study of the classics. It is said 
that a man forgets even how to read his Greek and Latin. 
Undoubtedly he often does, sometimes, perhaps, for the reason 
that he has never learned. But what an unthinking world it 
is! I would challenge any ordinary professional man who has 
been out of college for fifteen years to deduce the formula for 
the parabola or the ellipse. Much rather, I fancy, would a man 
attempt to read again some once familiar page of Horace; and, 
badly as he might fare in trying to get the meaning out of a 
page of Cicero at sight, he would in most cases come off better 
than if he attempted to solve at sight a problem in spherical 
trigonometry. In point of fact, the information gained from 
humanistic studies does not suffer by comparison with any other 
in respect of its subsequent fate. But the greater fact is that what 
one carries away and really keeps, outside of mental habits and 
the power of expression, that which lasts longest of all is not 
information at all, but the fourth and fifth items of our count — 
outlooks, horizons, backgrounds, appreciation — the power, to 
use Arnold's words about Sophocles, "to see life steadily, and 
see it whole." This has its immense value for the man himself — 
for his mental sanity, and his enjoyment of life; and it has its 
immense value for the man in his relation to his fellow-workers. 

I infer, then, that when one comes to count the sums total 
of acquisition conferred respectively by the humanistic and the 
scientific training — discipline, power oTexpression, information, 
outlook, appreciation — the advantage, for the average untechni- 
cal man, lies with the former. 



THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF HUMANISTIC STUDIES 57 

Is this a solution in the air? Have we been spending 
an idle hour in dreams? What are the facts of experi- 
ence? Here, then, we are driven back, in spite of our pro- 
test, to the test of fact. But let us trust our impressions in the 
large, rather than our memory of this or that man. What is it that 
gives the lawyer, the physician, the politician, the man of busi- 
ness his power of carrying others in the direction in which he 
wishes them to go? What makes the leader? Undoubtedly in 
part his skill and special knowledge in that particular thing 
which he has elected to do. What next ? We are pitted against 
one another in business and professional life, and in social life. 
Temperament will tell, and physique will tell. But what comes 
next after these is not a knowledge of physics and chemistry, 
of astronomy, of biology. If facts are wanted, the facts of his- 
tory, of literature, and of art will go farther in the life of the 
untechnical man than the facts with regard to the processes 
which fill the air of our cities with the smoke of manufactures. 
A knowledge of the constitution of Athens under Solon, re- 
mote as it is, is as likely to come a propos as is a knowledge of 
the constitution of molecules. But the most practical thing of 
all — to say it for the last time — is none of these. It is the power 
of seeing rightly, and in its broader relations, what other men 
see less rightly and more narrowly, and of so expressing oneself 
that they shall see it. It is the power of thought and feeling. 
This is obvious enough in the ordinary life of a community, but 
it is startlingly obvious in the great crises of national life. The 
two most potent forces which this generation of Americans has 
seen, the forces which, more powerfully than any others, have 
determined the courses of human life in remote places and for 
remote times, have been, not the steam engine and the electric 
circuit, but love of country and hatred of the oppression of man 
by man — sentiments quite as likely to be fostered in the young 
student's breast by the Persians of Aeschylus or the Epic of 
Virgil as by Puckle's Conic Sections or Williams' Chemistry. 

And yet — let me say once more — you must not mistake 
me. I believe in conic sections and in chemistry as de- 



58 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

voutly as I do in Greek and Latin, and, wherever any man 
says they shall not be taught in universities with the utmost 
freedom, and on terms of perfect equality with the inherited 
curriculum, I am with the mathematician and the chemist and 
against him. But my reason is, not the unthinking claim 
that a knowledge of these things can be brought to bear in 
the daily life of a professional man or a business man, while 
a knowledge of history, of literature, or of art cannot, but 
that the human mind has a right to whatever its natural 
tastes and aptitudes demand. Let us have industrial schools 
for workmen — Heaven knows that we need them ; let us 
have technical schools to train up directors of great works 
and possible inventors; and let us have the liberal education, with 
great range of individual choice, for the other careers. Let us 
grant with all our hearts that, in the dye- factory, a knowledge 
of chemistry is practical and a knowledge of Greek unpractical; 
but let us not delude ourselves, or suffer others to delude us, 
with the popular fallacy that the same thing holds in the office 
of the lawyer, the doctor, the editor, or the business man. Let 
us not turn from the worship of a college fetich to bow down 
before a fetich of the market-place. Let us not believe that the 
day is coming when man is to be defined as a manufacturing 
animal, and the leading university is to be the one in which, in 
popular phraseology, nothing useless is taught. 



V. THE PLACE OF LATIN IN SECONDARY EDUCATION 1 



e. d. McQueen gray 

The University of New Mexico 



No unprejudiced observer of our system of national educa- 
tion can deny that the position of the Latin language in the sec- 
ondary school is far from satisfactory. At the beginning of the 
expansion movement in our national education the general aim 
was still a cultural one and the classical scholar enjoyed as such 
the respect of the community and shared in the direction of the 
national scheme of education. At the present day conditions 
have almost completely changed. The popularization of the 
natural sciences and the application of scientific discoveries to 
the arts and industries have given a new impetus and direction 
to education and brought prominently forward as necessary parts 
of the scholastic curriculum subjects heretofore unknown or dis- 
regarded, while the rapid spread of national education has filled 
the ranks of the teaching army with a preponderating mass of 
educators who, keenly alive to the needs of the class from which 
they have sprung and zealous in their endeavors to meet these 
needs with thoroughness and efficiency, are either ignorant of or 
indifferent to classical learning in general and loath to admit the 
educative force of the study of the Latin language. The law 
of relative exigency, applied from the standpoint of practical ef- 
ficiency as the object to be aimed at in education, has forced Latin 
into the background, and the study of the language is regarded 
as a side issue, not to be seriously considered among the educa- 
tional problems of the present day. 

/Now, practical efficiency is a splendid possession. It includes 
many precious things : health of body and mind, high aims, firm- 
ness of purpose — all the various qualifications which go to the 
making of the good citizen. But practical efficiency as it appears 
to be understood by our educational directors does not represent 
so inclusive an idea. It seems to be interpreted in our national 

1 Read before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club, Ann Arbor, March 30, ion. 

59 



60 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

scheme of education as the fitness to seize and turn to personal 
advantage opportunities of a practical sort, and to be concerned 
rather with the production of an efficient human machine than 
with the wise development of the human mind. The results of such 
an interpretation present themselves in many different forms ; and 
one of them is a decrease in the exercise of intellectuality 
wherever tangible benefit to the user does not appear to be thereby 
promoted. This is distinctly noticeable in respect to our use of 
the English language, which has shown during the last three or 
four decades, and particularly during the last fifteen or twenty 
years, a distinct tendency toward deterioration. 

In this regard I quote from a bulletin written by myself and 
published last December by the University of New Mexico : 

We use words out of their proper connotation ; we jumble together and 
misapply metaphors and phrases; we misplace the parts of speech, turn ad- 
jectives into adverbs, nouns into verbs, and vice versa; we deprive the lan- 
guage of its natural point and emphasis by our failure to distinguish delicate 
gradations of meaning and by our habitual exaggeration in speech. In short, 
we frequently appear to handle the language cleverly but unintelligently, as 
people who have learned it by rote rather than reason. Our newspapers and 
magazines are filled week after week and month after month with an exhi- 
bition of extravagant, flamboyant English, which could not but appear 
ridiculous or tragic, contemptible or pathetic, to an educated reader, were it 
not that the eye. and ear of the educated reader have been rendered compara- 
tively dull and callous by the reiteration of the affront. And to set against 
this our acknowledged deftness and pertinence in allusive word and phrase 
and all the mental dexterity of our literary craftsmen — a mere demonstra- 
tion of our national quickmindedness — is beside the point; just so might one 
accused of a serious misdemeanor defend himself by exhibiting his skill at 
parlor tricks. The truth is that our "hurry-up" temper and impatience of 
restraint and control of all kinds are leading us toward the use of our 
language merely as a vehicle for expression of a "practcal" sort, and to do 
that is to use it unintelligently, to degrade it from its high estate; and the 
moment when the degradation of the language begins is a critical moment 
in the history of a nation. 

And this, be it noted, does not apply merely to the uneducated 
class or to the semi-literate journalist or magazine writer. It 
includes the large majority of the educators in our public schools 
and many of the professors and instructors in our colleges and 
universities at the present day. Again I quote from the bulletin : 



LA TIN IN SECOND A R Y ED UCA Tl ON 6 1 

Of course, if we are agreed that this, the so-called "practical" use, is 
the proper end of the language, then no argument is possible, and we must 
be content to take our place among the nations accordingly, as a people lack- 
ing in some of the finer qualities of civilized folk. But if we admit that 
language is something more than an expedient vehicle to meet the call of 
the moment and the need of the hour ; that it has grown with the passage of 
years to be a treasure-house of human thought in its amplest, deepest, highest 
expression ; that the language of a people is the sublimate of the thought and 
deed of the race throughout recorded time and in very truth the liveliest 
epitome of its history; does not then this native English of ours come into 
our hands, not as a mere ephemeral possession to be squandered or con- 
served as we will, but rather as a heritage bequeathed to us by generation 
after generation of men whose lives, shining through it, have helped to make 
it the speaking monument that it is to the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon people? 
Does it not become a bequest of a solemn, even sacred, character? And are 
not we, its trustees, bound in honor so to employ this inheritance of ours 
as to hand it on in our turn not a whit impoverished or debased, but even 
richer, nobler, and more glorious through our stewardship? And admitting 
this, as admit it we must, since denial would plainly be as futile as dishonor- 
able, then must we not next admit that it is our duty to see that our youth 
shall be taught really to understand the language we are placing in their 
hands, so that, knowing it for what it is, they may be fitted to use it as it 
deserves ? 

Now I hold that the present deterioration in our use of the 
English language, which no thoughtful observer can fail to note, 
and which all fair-minded persons unite in deploring, is directly- 
traceable to the neglect of the study of Latin; and it is to the 
connection of Latin with the study of English itself that I wish 
to call your attention. 

I must tell you frankly that in my opinion Latin cannot on 
its own merits establish any claim to be an essential part of our 
national education. The teacher of Latin who grounds his plea 
for the language on the basis of classical scholarship, the training 
of "a scholar and a gentleman" and so forth, is fighting a lost 
battle; he is a "pagan suckled in a creed outworn." We have 
passed all that; we are living in another day. Pure scholarship 
in some form or other will persist throughout the changes of 
national life; but it is, as such, no longer a material part of 
national education. 

But the claim for Latin as a factor in national education lies 



62 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

deeper than this. It is the true interpreter of the English lan- 
guage; the key to a real understanding of our native speech. 
What can he know of English who only English knows? And 
who can really know English unless he knows it through Latin? 
The road to a proper appreciation of English lies directly through 
Latin, and the claim for Latin as a part of our national education 
must rest on this foundation. The youth of this nation have as 
much right to be taught to know English through Latin as they 
have to be taught algebra, geometry, or history — possibly an even 
greater right, since all humanizing studies must be correlated 
with, and find their common focus in, English, and through 
Latin alone can English be fitly comprehended. 

But to establish this right the whole system of teaching Latin 
must be altered. We must no longer content ourselves with 
trying to teach the pupil to translate Latin into English ; but we 
must teach him from the very first to read English into Latin. 
Herein lies the real value of the study of Latin. A student who 
learns to translate his own language into another finds that he is 
gaining in a very simple way a knowledge and mastery of his 
native tongue which he cannot otherwise acquire. Taught Latin 
from this point of view, the student not merely acquires in the 
easiest fashion possible a thorough knowledge of the character- 
istics of the Latin language, but he gains a knowledge of his 
own language that no other system of teaching English is capable 
of conferring. 

This then is the stand for the teacher of Latin to take, if he 
is to recover for his special study the position which it now has 
lost. Far more than that; he will rescue his native language 
from deterioration and abuse. If he takes his stand as maintain- 
ing the right of the student in the public school to gain that 
knowledge of his native tongue which Latin alone can give, and 
will reconstruct his teaching to that end, he can render a service 
to his country of an almost incomparable sort, by restoring the 
perception of the finer qualities of our native tongue to a nation 
which is rapidly losing it. This is the great opportunity which 
lies before the teacher of Latin in the public schools; and the 
present moment is essentially a critical one. 



LA TIN IN SECOND AR Y ED UCA T10N 63 

Possibly the teacher of Latin may think that such a system of 
instruction as I have recommended is a counsel of perfection, 
which only the most highly trained educators can follow. This 
is far from being the case. It is really much easier and simpler 
to teach the pupil to translate English into Latin, proceeding 
from one known content to another which has been explained 
through it, than to attempt teaching him to translate Latin into 
English. The study hour, instead of being a weariness of the 
flesh, will become an exhilaration of the spirit, and the moment 
the student begins — and he begins very early — to perceive that his 
study of Latin from this new point of view leads to a fuller knowl- 
edge of his native language, from that moment will he begin to 
feel a zest and interest in his work which heretofore have been 
very generally absent. In this regard I speak from experience. I 
myself (and instructors working with me also) by adopting this 
method have frequently prepared students previously unac- 
quainted with Latin to pass public examinations requiring a 
knowledge of the language equal to that obtained in four years 
of high-school work, in less than six months. There is in fact 
no difficulty about it : it is the natural and proper method of 
teaching any foreign language; and if the Latin instructor will 
adopt it he will find his pupils telling him that they are not only 
acquiring Latin with ease but are learning more about the struc- 
ture of English in the Latin classroom than in any other. 

This then is, I maintain, the great opportunity now before 
the teacher of Latin in the secondary school; and the place of 
Latin in secondary education is first and foremost that of the 
interpreter of the English language and the key to its appropriate 
use. 



VI. MR. JAMES BRYCE ON THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT 
LITERATURES 

The Right Honorable James Bryce, British ambassador at Washington, 
gave the Phi Beta Kappa address at the fourth annual dinner of the Michigan 
chapter of the society, in Ann Arbor, April 4, 191 1. The main portion of the 
address was devoted to the value of the ancient literatures in life. 

Mr. Bryce chose as his starting-point a sentence from an American novel: 
"The life of an American man is business." To this view he took exception, 
and declared that all universities, while they prepared men for business of one 
sort or another, should prepare them also for the side of life which, though not 
gainful, is profitable and valuable. In this sense, he considered that the ancient 
literatures were practical studies, and there was even a sense in which the 
farther removed they were from the present time and thought the more impor- 
tant were they as an intellectual influence, because they showed more clearly 
what is permanent in human nature as distinguished from what is evanescent, 
and what man had been when first he rose to high levels of thought and poetical 
creation. 

Among the ancient literatures Mr. Bryce included the writings of the 
Arabs, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, and even the mediaeval Dante, 
and the Icelandic sagas. 

"The study of the old classical languages, which people commonly but 
erroneously call dead, said Mr. Bryce, in substance, "is important and 
profitable for many reasons. One is that it gives us a comprehension of our 
own language, and this in turn acts upon our thoughts, so that our minds are 
liberalized, our imaginations quickened, and our knowledge of all things 
becomes more accurate. The study is important also because it aids in the 
acquisition of style. 

"Another great value of old literatures is that they aid us to understand 
the present by giving us a true comprehension of the past. We all live too 
much in the present, or, as the poet says, 'the world is too much with us.' Yet 
we can never understand the present without an accurate, comprehensive, and 
sympathetic knowledge of the past; and the best way to know the past is to 
understand its literature. The remote past, too, is worthy of our study, for 
in it we find those things which are primal and universal in human nature. 
To see how greatly we men have changed is most enlightening, and to know the 
measure of the progress of man is highly instructive as indicating the probable 
paths to be followed by civilization in the future. 

"It is much to be regretted that the number of men who are studying Latin 
is becoming small, and the number of those studying Greek, infinitesimal. I 
venture to predict, however, that if the universities can safely pass the danger 
period that is threatening us now, in twenty or thirty years there will be a 
great reaction in the attitude toward these ancient literatures. The pressure 
of intense competition in business will diminish in the next generation; the 
great corporations will have largely completed their exploitation of natural 
resources; gainful occupations will relatively decrease in importance; the ideals 
of men will return to those subjects in which the ancient literatures contribute 
to make life rich and enjoyable, and the study of the classics will revive." 

64 



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